Anti-Google Conspiracy Widens

Wow, it's really happening. Yesterday, we mentioned that Microsoft (MSFT) was reportedly teaming up with News Corp (NWSA) to block stories from Fox News and other Murdoch properties from being scanned and indexed by Google News. Now, Dean Singleton—the owner of the Denver Post, the Oakland Tribune, and an army of suburban newspapers around the country—is about to do the same thing.

According to Bloomberg, Singleton plans to start charging subscription fees for access to his papers' web sites as early as next year. And because Google (GOOG) gives you the gist of his stories without paying for them, he plans to block the company's spybots from accessing his sites. "The things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic,” Singleton told Bloomberg.

As readers must surely know, journos of every stripe have grown alternately terrified or catatonic as the Internets made content free and therefore unfeasible as a business model. The world has been waiting for some newspaper baron to start this fight for some time; the New York Times clumsily sealed its columnists behind a firewall for a few years, but failed to do anything but make Paul Krugman less relevant. Murdoch first hinted that he'd adopt a more aggressive approach to subscriptions when he announced he and his partners would charge for access to Hulu. Now, it appears that he'll follow through with news-gathering as well.

And it looks like Singleton will join him. In the past, we've argued that Singleton's editorial formula—hyper-localism, slave wages, union-busting—strips papers of almost any interesting writing, but it pays the bills at a time when his rivals are dying. His cleverness at wringing money from a moribund business model suggests that this stab at taking Google by the horns just might work.

But what do we know? Especially when industry analysts are already saying this plan to lock out Google is idiotic. Take Jeffrey Lindsey, a Bernstein Research analyst who, eWeek reported, recently wrote, "We think the prospects of succeeding with such a strategy ... are extremely thin to say the least."

So far, Google reps have declined to comment on these moves. But we know what they'd say: Google News drives a lot of traffic to the sites whose stories it indexes, and those readers are the only way media outlets can make money. Cutting off the world of potential advertising gawkers will only cost media sites more revenue than any subscriptions can take in.