News Corp. may take measures to prevent Google and other search engines from accessing its websites, chief executive Rupert Murdoch said in a Nov. 9 interview with the Wall Street Journal technology blog.
Murdoch said Internet users should not be allowed to read articles online without paying for them because Google’s promotion of stories on Google sites constitutes stealing.
Google spokesman Chris Gaither said in an email that Google’s use of the stories is completely legal.
‘Our approach is fully consistent with copyright law,’ he said. ‘We show just enough for users to identify the stories they’re interested in ‘- headline, short snippet and link to the publisher’s site ‘- and we direct users to those news sites to read the stories.’
He said news organizations are in complete control over whether and how much of their content appears in search results.
‘Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search,’ he said. ‘But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.’
Gaither said Google News searches are actually beneficial to news organizations.
‘Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organizations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute,’ he said. ‘Each of those visits offers a business opportunity for the publishers to show ads, win loyal readers and sell subscriptions.’
Currently, full articles from The Wall Street Journal are accessible without charge through Google searches, according to the WSJ blog. However, if an Internet user clicks various articles after the initial search, the user will eventually reach a pay wall, with one paragraph of the article and a subscription form.
WSJ spokeswoman Ashley Huston said in an email that the WSJ generally charges for its business and finance articles, while other content remains accessible for free online.
‘WSJ.com has had a subscription model for more than 10 years, and we offer a mix of both free and subscription content,’ Huston said. ‘Because of that mix, WSJ.com currently has more than one million subscribers and more than 23 million visitors per month.’
Boston University journalism professor Chris Daly said he agrees that search engines are beneficial rather than harmful to news organizations such as the WSJ.
‘In the online world, the most valuable thing is traffic,’ Daly said. ‘If the aggregator is linking to you, the aggregator is doing you a favor.’
In today’s society, the challenge for news businesses is to find a way to make money, Daly said. The media must adapt to the changing times, he said.
‘We’re in a period of very difficult transition,’ Daly said. ‘The legacy media are not very well suited for this environment. Not all of [the older organizations] are going to make it into the future. However, the news will go on.’
Daly said he thinks Murdoch’s comments about Google may be due to business concerns.
‘Rupert Murdoch is a global businessman and he is operating a very complicated media empire,’ Daly said. ‘He rarely reveals exactly what he wants. I suspect that there’s a hidden motive.’
College of Communication freshman Ashley Fryer said she thinks the question of Google as a news-gatherer is a delicate topic.
‘It can’t be considered stealing,’ Fryer said. ‘I think it’s all about seeing where the future goes with journalism.’
College of Arts and Sciences junior Kelley Holden said she has mixed feelings.
‘It’s nice to get the news out there without paying for it,’ she said. ‘[But] I think they’re already hurting because of the news being online. It’s a changing world out there.’