Because geek is cool and clever

Murdoch: he speak with forked tongue October 20, 2009

By now Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to put an end to free online news content has become well-known, having been given countless broadcasting minutes and newspaper inches (not least in this particular column) since the media giant said he intended to start charging to read his websites.

His paid subscription model has yet to begin but almost everybody with a moment’s experience in the web industry is unanimous; this particular genie will not be coaxed or forced back into its bottle. Online brand loyalty is slim and if one site suddenly wants your money to read it, the vast majority of your once regular readership will simply go elsewhere

I think it’s fair to say that most media watchers are expecting Murdoch’s plan – if, indeed, he ever actually goes through with it – to fall flat on it face.

That The Times and Sun newspaper owner is smarting from the current failure of the web advertising revenue business model is hardly surprising, but his recent stance against search engines is a different story and suggests an almost utter ignorance of the internet that is frankly embarrassing.

At the recent World Media Summit in Beijing, Murdoch’s speech attacked Google and its like, calling them ‘kleptomaniacs’ and ‘plagiarists’ for apparently stealing his content.

He was talking, one can only presume, about service such as Google News which display very small snippets of news websites and then – and here’s the crucial bit – link readers to the full article.

The way he complains, it seems that Murdoch is under an impression that search engines simply take all his content and pass it off as their own rather than act as a free signpost to it.

What makes his whining even less credible is that telling Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc. not to crawl through and index your website is so utterly trivial it is one of the first things any novice website creator learns how to do, let alone the professional developers behind major international newspaper websites. A couple of lines of code added to a special file and you can distance yourself from every search engine on the web.

Let’s be very clear; Murdoch needs search engines a lot more than search engines need Murdoch, a fact he will learn if and when he makes his content subscription only and those services he so derides choose to simply ignore it.

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