TECHPULSE  Since media baron Rupert Murdoch took up the battle cry recently to seize back the publishing initiative on the Internet from "freeloading parasites and vampires" such as Google and other search engines, more disenchanted newspaper publishers have joined in the chorus of complaints.

The World Newspaper Congress, which met in Hyderabad, India, last week, epitomized the angst of the media industry as it faces "a critical moment" amidst falling print advertising revenue, circulation and readership. 

The rhetorics coming out of the Hyderabad forum stressed mainly on demands by newspapers to get search engines like Google to come clean with their news aggregation and pay their dues for the news they use.

Google, as we all know, controls the major bulk of search engine traffic on the Internet.

As it is, the newspaper industry is in a perfect storm. We have been reading about how the future looks bleak unless publishers can come up with new Internet strategies and business models, and not continue to be in digital denial.

Google was seen as the main villain of the piece for "stealing" news stories without sharing the advertising revenue.

For that reason, the traditional media establishments who feel they are being short-changed by Google are drumming up the call for paywalls on their news websites.

They are talking of de-indexing their content from Google while at the same time accusing the search engine giant of "thievery."

Is that the prize they want to pay?

As pointed out by the experts, it only takes a simple "disallow" in the robot.txt file to block the Google bot from indexing your content but still web users can get links to other sources of news and information.

If they do that, News Corp's websites will lose traffic generated by Google or simply "disappeared" from the radar of search engines. Is that the prize they want to pay?

In a twist to this intriguing issue, Murdoch's News Corp even tried to offer its content to Microsoft's search engine Bing and expected the software giant to pay for the "marriage of convenience."

News Corp's attempt to bed with Microsoft obviously raised some eyebrows. But web analysts believe Google is too well entrenched as "master of the search universe" to feel threatened by this move.

Commenting on the News Corp-Microsoft anti-Google pact, PC World's Ian Paul said: "An exclusive deal with Bing may look like an attractive deal for both Microsoft and News Corp, but the concept is likely to end up being a major failure for Bing."

He questioned: "But does Microsoft seriously believe it can force Google to also start paying for search content? Not likely."

What is more likely is that Microsoft may be throwing good money away.

However, in a minor act of concession, Google appears to accede to the Murdoch-led brouhaha by announcing on its news blog that newspaper publishers will now be able to impose a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through its search engine.

Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen wrote in a blog post that under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites.

He said that users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages. Does that mean Google is blinking?

Confused news aggregation

Most media analysts are not impressed by the Murdoch-led initiative to impose charges for online news content despite the fact that the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Murdoch's News Corp, has done fairly well with paying readers so far.

Analysts are not slow in pointing out that the WSJ is a specialized publication, addressing a niche market - the financial sector.

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington (pic), in a rebuttal to Murdoch's speech at a journalism conference in Washington organized by the Federal Trade Commission last week, huffed that the media tycoon had confused news aggregation with wholesale misappropriation.

Murdoch had reiterated at the FTC hearing his belief that web users would pay for content. In his address, he continued his attack on online news aggregation as "theft" of content.

"There's no such thing as free news," said Murdoch. Later in her speech, she told the hearing that Murdoch "has legal redress" against that already.

"Aggregation, on the other hand, within the fair use exceptions to copyright law is part of the web's DNA. Period," she said.

Huffington cited old media proponents as having fallen "asleep at the wheel, missed the writing on the wall, let the train leave the station...and quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the disruptive innovation the Internet and new media represent."

It is obvious that the present crisis is a wake-up call to an industry that has been slow in embracing the rapid changes taking place on the information superhighway where technological innovation and improvisation are the vehicles to reach a "Brave New Media World."

But a truly workable business model for newspapers that will lift the industry out of its present doldrums has yet to surface.

According to Huffington, while Murdoch and his band of paywall crusaders continue to believe that people are prepared to pay for news online, a recent survey in the US reveals that 80 per cent of readers "wouldn't bother" to read news and magazines online if the content were no longer free.

* Mark Khoo writes about the blogging experience and other Internet issues. He blogs at TheNextPost.com  and Markkscript.Posterous.com.