Other Publishers Following News Corp. Behind Cloak of Invisibility

Two more publishers may be joining News Corp. in its game of hide-and-go-seek with Google. According to Bloomberg's Greg Bensinger and Brian Womack, MediaNews Group, publishers of the Denver Post and dozens of other papers across the country, and A.H. Belo, owners of the Dallas Morning News, are contemplating making their content unsearchable by Google. Both publishers are weighing the idea as they consider how high and solid their pay walls should be.

Bensinger and Womack quote A.H. Belo executive vice president James Moroney describing the traffic driven to the paper from Google as "not being monetized to any great degree…. 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.”

By joining News Corp. under the cloak of invisibility, the papers may be hurting themselves more than Google, according to Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, who told investors that News Corp.'s plan would damage only itself, according to Reuters' Robert MacMillan. "The only way such a strategy would hurt Google in our view is if all of the major newspapers and the major news sources, including the AP and Reuters, were to agree to a watertight cartel," Lindsay said.

MacMillan also wonders if News Corp.'s proposed exclusive search deal with Microsoft's Bing would draw the attention of the Department of Justice.

In August, the Los Angeles Times reported that News Corp. was approaching rival publishers like the New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company, Hearst, and the Tribune company about forming some sort of pay-wall consortium. At the time, John E. Morton of Morton Research Inc. told Portfolio.com, "I hope it works. The danger here is that the antitrust division will get excited about a conspiracy. How they get around that, I don't know. It's in all of their interests to come to some kind of agreement."