Let’s talk about MediaNews Group first. It operates 54 daily newspapers with a combined daily circulation of 2.4 million. Corresponding websites are part of the mix, as are a TV station and some radio stations.
As for the organization’s take on blocking Google, CEO Dean Singleton told that some pay walls are going up next year, and “[t]he things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic.”
Then there’s A.H. Belo to consider. It owns and operates four papers and 12 sites, and is weighing a similar approach. Only Executive Vice President James Moroney seemed less than interested in search traffic, saying, “It’s akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.”
The idea of keeping Google away from content appears to be gaining a bit of momentum, then, and with some additional , Rupert Murdoch’s idea could go further than critics first expected.
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