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Washington. News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch says that Google’s and Microsoft’s access to his newspapers could be limited to a “headline or a sentence or two” once he erects a pay wall around his titles’ Web sites.

Murdoch believed most US newspapers would eventually end up charging readers online, as he does with The Wall Street Journal and plans to do with his other properties, beginning with The Times of London.

“You’ll find, I think, most newspapers in this country are going to be putting up a pay wall,” he said. “Now how high does it go, does it allow visitors to have the first couple paragraphs or certain feature articles, we’ll see. We’re experimenting ourselves.”

Murdoch said “we’re going to stop people like Google and Microsoft and whoever from taking our stories for nothing.”

Search advertising had produced a “river of gold” for Google, he said, “but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers. And I think they ought to stop it, the newspapers ought to stand up and make them do their own reporting or whatever.”

Murdoch said he did not expect search engines would pay for access to newspapers. “We’ll be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that’s followed by a subscription form,” he said.

He dismissed concerns that readers used to getting news for free would be reluctant to pay.

“I think when they’ve got nowhere else to go they’ll start paying,” he said.

Murdoch praised the Apple iPad, calling it a “glimpse of the future.” He predicted the iPad would have eight or nine competitors in the next 12 months and said the devices could save newspapers. “There’s going to be tens of millions of these things sold all over the world,” he said.

“It may be the saving of newspapers because you don’t have the costs of paper, ink, printing, trucks. I’m old, I like the tactile experience of the newspaper,” he said, but “if you have fewer newspapers and more of these, that’s okay.”



Agence France-Presse