News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch said on Tuesday that Google and Microsoft’s access to his newspapers could be limited to a “headline or a sentence or two” once he erects a pay wall around his titles’ Web sites.
Murdoch, in an interview with journalist Marvin Kalb for the Kalb Report, also said he believed most US newspapers would eventually end up charging readers online, like he does with the Wall Street Journal and plans to do with his other properties beginning with British newspaper the Times.
“You’ll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall,” he said.
“Now how high does it go, does it allow [visitors] to have the first couple paragraphs or certain feature articles, we’ll see. We’re experimenting with it ourselves,” he said.
The News Corp chief said “we’re going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories for nothing.”
Search advertising had produced a “river of gold” for Google, he said, “but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers. And I think they ought to stop it, the newspapers ought to stand up and make them do their own reporting or whatever.”
Murdoch said he did not expect search engines would pay for access to newspapers.
“We’ll be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that’s followed by a subscription form,” he said.
Murdoch dismissed concerns that readers used to getting news on the Internet for free would be reluctant to pay.
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