This is a different take, so I posted it on it's own.
<snip>
According to a TV interview with Sir Rupert (video) conducted last Friday by David Speers of the Murdoch-owned Sky News, the aging media baron is considering blocking Google's access to his online empire after all his sites adopt a pay wall, as the Wall Street Journal has done. That would (in theory) make it invisible to the Big Friendly Search Giant. Per PaidContent:
Here’s how Murdoch replied when Speers asked why he hasn’t blocked sites from being seen by search engines: "I think we will. But that's when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it's not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story but if you’re not a paying subscriber, you get a paragraph and a subscription form."
As PaidContent's Staci D. Kramer points out, however, Murdoch does not seem to understand how his own flagship publication actually works online:
I just found two WSJ stories through Google and was able to read each of them in different browsers. Clicking a second story from the article page brought up a promo about how I could see more of the Journal free online—if I register—but I could still read the story. Third story—I was blocked. (I’m a subscriber but logged out to test this.) The Journal isn’t invisible—but much of it can be impenetrable after a certain point.
<snip>
I'm with Staci on that one. It used to be you simply couldn't get WSJ content online without paying. Now about half the time I can find the Journal story I'm looking for -- and the rest of the time I can find a pretty good summary elsewhere.
<snip>
The paywall issue though is a bigger problem, in my ever so humble opinion.
News is a commodity. Even if one source breaks an exclusive story -- and those are incredibly rare -- everyone else will have it within the hour. And the good ones will follow up with new information, moving the story along. Because that's the way journalism works.
Worse, it only takes one blogger with a paid subscription to blab that exclusive story to the rest of the world. I don't care how many $700-an-hour lawyers you have, you won't be able to suppress that. What happens next? The world flocks to the blogger's door, because the site is free, and skips the original source with the coin box attached.<snip>
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/fox-news-takes-google-506
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