From AM Radio (Australia)

Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the New York School of Journalism and author of "What Would Google Do", says the deal will achieve little for Mr Murdoch and won't affect Google's dominance on the net.

JEFF JARVIS: You know the newspaper industry is looking for enemies. It is looking for people to blame for their troubles when only they should blame themselves.

They have 15 years to figure out the future on the web and they haven't and so now they are desperate and they are looking for someone to blame and Google is the most convenient to blame because it is the most successful online.

JOHN SHOVELAN: What could they achieve though together?

JEFF JARVIS: A Microsoft/News Corp deal would be at most a mosquito bite on an elephant's butt. It would be unnoticed. It wouldn't have any impact whatsoever on Google.

{snip} A significant portion of news Web sites' traffic comes via search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. According to HitWise, The Wall Street Journal gets about 26 percent of its U.S. traffic via Google, including 11 percent from Google News. Much of that comes from navigational queries such as "Wall Street Journal" or "WSJ."

"Even if Murdoch decides to block Google, these navigational search queries will most likely remain intact," wrote Bill Tancer of HitWise. "While the Journal may lose traffic if it ceases to cooperate with Google the loss may be less then anticipated."

"The potential loss of Google News traffic is potentially more serious. As reported here, over the three years, WSJ.com's traffic from Google News has grown from 2% to over 11%," he continued. "The Journal is receiving more than double the traffic from Google News than newspaper sites overall. ... Bing, a potential News Corp. suitor for search exclusivity, provides less than half of Google News' volume as of last week."

But Murdoch apparently doesn't want to cut off search engines altogether. He wants Microsoft to pay for the exclusive rights to index News Corp. content on Bing, according to reports by the Financial Times and All Things Digital.

And News Corp. reportedly isn't the only one. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher reports that other news publishers, including The Associated Press, also are talking to Microsoft about Bing indexing exclusivity.

The big question is whether people would actively use a different search engine – namely, Bing instead of Google – simply to search for content they couldn't get with Google. Would people really care?

"If The Wall Street Journal isn't there, they do a search and likely something else is out there," said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. "What they do is they effectively deny themselves the opportunity to get visitors directly from Google."

The Wall Street Journal, of course, is an esteemed newspaper with a dedicated audience. Its articles already are hidden behind a paywall; when users land on an article page, they are shown two paragraphs and a subscription option. So even people who get to a Journal article via Google have to pay to read the whole thing (unless they, like me, also know how to use Google to bypass the paywall).

Besides, Sullivan noted, most readers who would refuse to read anything but The Wall Street Journal most likely already are subscribers who don't use Google News anyway.

The Associated Press, for its part, covers just about everything from just about everywhere in the world, so a wealth of news content potentially could disappear from Google's indexing. But the AP has partnered with Google for years; cutting ties would be surprising.

And the endless web of articles appearing on multitudes of Web sites, through wire-service subscriptions and content-sharing deals, makes it nearly impossible for one news organization to completely cut off Google indexing when similar – if not the exact same – content can be found elsewhere.

"It just seems unlikely that they're going to be getting a huge number of people coming over (to Bing) for it to be in any way significant," Sullivan said of the rumored talks. "I think that this might be yet another incremental thing that might get people onto Bing, but it's not this monumental thing that some people are making it out to be."

Sullivan said some industry players believe that if News Corp. and Microsoft struck a deal, it could open the floodgates for more news organizations to abandon Google for better revenue on Bing. It would set Microsoft up as publishers' "cash daddy," Sullivan said.

And if it were Google, rather than Microsoft, exploring exclusivity with News Corp., people would be outraged, Sullivan said. The dominating Internet company would appear to be limiting access to publicly available information.

Instead, by striking deals with publishers, Microsoft – which, by the way, is always on shaky ground when it comes to antitrust issues – essentially would hand Google the opportunity to of start up exclusivity talks of its own.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/186042.asp

However this search engine game plays out among Google and Bing, even if they could get people to pay to get behind some firewall, it would be a minority of the current users anyway. There will always be some people like Graham who know how to work around the firewall (I'd ask Graham for the secret but it isn't worth it when it comes to the WSJ). There will be a lot of people who will just forget it, and even if almost every current search resulted in a fee for these providers, it isn't going to replace lost advertising revenue for newspapers and television or radio.

That's the real issue here. Rupert Murdoch puts on a brave face at shareholder meetings, but his antics betray him. This is a cry of anger and despair at seeing drastic revenue declines at all of his properties around the world. He's begun to realize some of this is related to the recession, but most is related to a failed business model that he can't change short of selling off all his properties while he can get some money for them.

Maybe if Murdoch's properties had content that people valued - like some real reporting - he could charge money for it, like the FT does. But he deliberately dumbed down his properties into infotainment enterprises, or in the case of FOX News, a pretense at being a legitimate news service based on objectivity. We can get celebrity news for free all over the place, so who needs Murdoch?

But something in the organization makes them behave like idiots, overall. They have been screwing up for many years now. It's gonna be a fiasco, no matter what.

combined with Murdoch was to undermine Google's attempt at announcing an operating system that competes with Windows.

From what I've read of Google's Chrome operating system, it's open source similar to other very effective 'free' open source programmes where companies depend on advertising rather than direct sales of their products. No I didn't buy Microsoft's Office to put on my hubby's new laptop, downloaded Open Office.org instead which does a fine job. What really chopped me off was Microsoft Office changing Word's format so previous copies of Word had difficulty opening some documents until a viewer made it possible to open them. Microsoft are rip-off artists making products that spy on my computer ... no I don't automatically update Windows after learning from my techie guru that while in the process Microsoft is looking at everything on my hard drive. I'm fed with Microsoft updating operating systems that don't work--Vista was a disaster! Memory hogs that don't work don't belong on my computer!

Am hoping that Google's, Chrome, operating system is better than Microsoft Windows and successfully competes with the unscrupulous owner's who for a time had a monopoly that it didn't manage well. It's surprising that Firefox hasn't been swallowed!

Murdoch like Microsoft lacks ethics!