New Haven Independent

Murdoch Tuesday re-declared war on the search engines and news websites that link to stories from the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Fox News, and other properties in his global Old Media empire.

Then New Media Queen Arianna Huffington blasted him for behaving like the very “thief” and “parasite” he accuses web journalists of being — without admitting that society is benefiting by all this joint linking of news stories. (Click on the play arrow for a snippet.)

Their confrontation in back-to-back keynote speeches wasn’t just a matter of two media celebs offering two takes on journalism. The debate drew on questions of how we will all get our news in the future, who will pay for it, and whether democracy will benefit.

The Old Media-New Media smackdown took place in two keynote speeches during the opening morning of a two-day Federal Trade Commission confab which poses the question, “How Will Journalism Survive The Internet Age?”

Murdoch told the standing-room-only gathering of media execs, regulators and experts that it will survive partly through his latest fight: against Google and other “aggregators” that link to headlines from his media properties.

Only a few years ago Murdoch pronounced that newspapers should put all stories on the web fore free. He has now become the most prominent proponent of placing content behind “pay walls,” requiring people to pony up to read them.

To that end, Murdoch recently threatened to prevent Google and Google News from linking to articles from his news organizations. He began in a very public way negotiating a deal to offer exclusive access instead to Microsoft’s new new search engine, Bing. In return he’d get paid a “modest” amount of money for the stories whose headlines and lede paragraphs get linked to.

Google=”Theft”

Murdoch Tuesday presented the quest to stop free news linking as not just a personal business strategy, but a public-interest issue, of fairness. He argued that search engines commit “theft” by linking to his stories and collecting ad revenue.

He didn’t say the G word. Instead, he spoke generically about “aggregators” and “search engines.”

“There are those who think they have the right to take our news content to use our content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production,” Murdoch said.

“These people are not investing in journalism. They are feeding off the hard work and investment of others.”

“To be impolite,” he added “it’s theft.”

The current situation “destroys the economics of producing high-quality content,” the New York Post publisher argued. “Content providers bear all the costs, while aggregators enjoy many of the benefits. We’re going to ensure that we get a fair and modest price for the value we provide.”

Oh Yeah? Go Ahead

In her address later Tuesday morning, Huffington noted that Murdoch has engaged in plenty of that “thievery” himself — from Huffington’s own prominent news site, the Huffington Post.

And she loves it. She wants him to “steal” some more.

Huffington noted that Murdoch’s own news websites do loads of that aggregating. The Wall Street Journal’s website has a tech section that consists primarily of linking to stories in other media. Fox.com has a similar politics section. Murdoch properties link to HuffPost stories every day, she noted.

“We drive a lot of traffic to them,” Huffington said. “And they like it.”

And “we love it when their sites link to us,” Huffington said. “We love the traffic. We love the eyeballs that we can monetize. It’s not a zero-sum game.” The new media is evolving as a “hybrid” combining original professional reporting with citizen contributions plus “aggregation” of other news sources’ material, Huffington argued.

“This is not going to happen,” she flatly declared about Murdoch’s Microsoft/Bing gambit.

Legal protections already exist for publishers to stop websites from reprinting or otherwise truly stealing stories, Huffington noted — and Murdoch hasn’t exercised that option.

So what was Murdoch up to?

Huffington voiced a suspicion that some media watchers have started to express: That he’s bluffing, threatening to give Microsoft an exclusive in order to strike a better deal from Google for royalties on linked news stories.

“You can shut down the indexing of your content by Google right now, this very minute, wherever you are, simply by actually clicking, ‘Disallow,’” Huffington pointed out. “It’s actually much faster than whining. But be careful what you wish for…

“You stand to lose a large part of your traffic overnight.”

On the other hand, Huffington noted wryly, “Not having Glenn Beck searchable on Google is a good thing for democracy.” But not for business.

Shared Optimism

What’s good for business?

Surprisingly, Huffington and Murdoch agreed that the new web media is.

Beneath their passionate disagreements, the two speakers painted an optimistic view Tuesday of an exciting new news landscape that offers more reporting to more people through newer technological conduits. They disagreed with the prevailing gloom and doom shared by the media elite gathered at the FTC confab — the idea that the decline of corporate monopoly print newspapers equals a decline in actual quality news reporting.

The Internet didn’t kill newspapers, Huffington and Murdoch said: Publishers of print newspapers failed to innovate or produce stories that people want to read. Both speakers cited the auto industry as a metaphor. Murdoch said some of those papers deserve to die. He compared them to auto companies that “make cars nobody wants to buy” and “restaurants that make meals that nobody wants to eat.”

They disagreed on how innovators will deliver the news meals that readers and viewers want. Murdoch argued that the answer lies in convincing readers to pay for news over the web. Huffington said that’ll never happen — and shouldn’t. She praised not-for-profit news experiments as well as “hybrid” for-profit sites like hers, all of which draw from a wide variety of revenue sources.