This article is more than 1 year old

Murdoch tells old media to 'stand up' to Google, Bing

News aggregation argy-bargy rumbles on

News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch has once again hit out at search engines, and called on newspaper publishers to stop the likes of Google and Microsoft’s Bing from freely displaying articles online.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington yesterday, Murdoch reiterated his disgust at how search engines handle news and called on old media to rethink how their stories are distributed on the web.

“It’s produced a river of gold, but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers,” he said, reports Bloomberg. “I think they ought to stop it, that the newspapers ought to stand up and let them do their own reporting.”

Murdoch, whose company publishes newspapers including The Times and the Wall Street Journal, wants to make only headlines and a few sentences available for free online, with an option for readers to subscribe to the service in order to view the full story. The Financial Times already has such a pay wall in place.

“Most newspapers in this country are going to have to put a pay wall up,” he said.

Recently News Corp has been mulling blocking Google from displaying its news, but no such action has been taken against the media giant yet.

Instead Murdoch’s firm has so far gone after much smaller players such as headline aggregation site NewsNow.co.uk. In January this year Times Online made changes to the robots.txt protocol to prevent NewsNow's spiders from collecting news stories from its site.

Last month The Times and The Sunday Times confirmed charges of £1 a day, or £2 a week, for access to its website.

Other Murdoch titles, such as The Sun and The News of the World are expected to follow suit later in the year. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like