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by  Chloe Albanesius

News Corp. will likely pull all of its newspaper content from Google News once its switches from an ad-supported to a subscription-based model, according to Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch on Friday sat down with Sky News, of which News Corp. is a partial owner, to discuss the impact of the Internet on news, among other things.

The Australian media tycoon has been critical of the Google News aggregation model, as well as similar offerings from Microsoft and Ask.com, which he says is tantamount to stealing. When asked why he has not pulled News Corp.-owned material from Google News, Murdoch said that it will likely happen down the road.

“I think we will,” Murdoch said. “But that’s going to be when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”

Google has argued that its news aggregator simply points users to content online and actually helps drive traffic to news sites. Murdoch was not impressed by Internet traffic and said he was more interested in finding loyal readers.

“What’s the point of having someone … who likes a headline they see in Google, come to us?” he asked. “The fact is, there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the Web sites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying.”

At this point, users can see the first paragraph of most articles in the Wall Street Journal, but to read the rest of the story online, they must sign up for a subscription. Murdoch was not sure that that is the approach he’ll take with all his publications.

“There’s a doctrine called fair use, which we believe could be challenged in the courts and barred altogether, but you know, it’s OK,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of advertising revenue, so we’ll take that slowly.”

In addition to the Journal, News Corp. owns Dow Jones, the New York Post, six newspapers in the U.K., including The Sunday Times and The Sun, and 25 publications in Australia. The company also owns Fox News and social networking site MySpace.

Murdoch brushed off the suggestion that people will not be able to afford subscriptions.

“Everyone can afford a newspaper; they’re the cheapest things in the world,” he said. “Think what you get out of it. It’s fabulous. And it’ll be even cheaper when you get it electronically.”

He was also not concerned about competing with publications that stick with the free, ad-supported model. “We’re better and if you look at most of [the competitors'] stuff, it’s stolen from the newspapers now and we’ll be suing them for copyright,” Murdoch said. “They’ll have to spend a lot more money on a lot more reporters to cover the world when they can’t steal from newspapers.”

http://www.pcmag.com/

Google has clarified that it will not index publishers against their wishes, in response to Rupert Murdoch’s threat to block the search engine from his newspapers’ websites.

A spokesman for the search giant said: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.

“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. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.” Read the full story

By Douglas MacMillan

After failing to acquire Twitter last fall, Facebook went shopping for what may be the next best thing.

On Aug. 10, Facebook said it had acquired FriendFeed, the Mountain View (Calif.) social aggregation service founded by Google (GOOG) alumni Bret Taylor and Jim Norris in 2008. The deal, which The Wall Street Journal reported to be valued at nearly $50 million in cash and stock, gives Facebook top talent and advanced technology in an area many see as the next great frontier on the Web: real-time search. Read the full story