All eyes on Murdoch as newspapers ponder digital future.

Byline: AFP 

WASHINGTON: Is Rupert Murdoch bluffing Making a bold high-stakes gamble that will save the troubled newspaper industry Or pursuing a pipe dream that can only end in failure

The News Corp. chairman has prompted a fierce debate among media watchers with his accusation that Google is "stealing" from his vast newspaper empire and his threat to block the search engine from accessing its content.

The 78-year-old Murdoch has already announced plans to make readers pay to read his newspapers online but his warning that he may also make them invisible to Google has given rise to much speculation about the wisdom of the move.

"I think that when you re talking about Rupert Murdoch there s one of two things going on," said Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

"One possibility -- and I certainly wouldn t rule it out given his track record -- is that he s two or three steps ahead with something that none of the rest of us have figured out yet," Kennedy told AFP.

"But I think the other possibility is he really doesn t understand this medium and he s making a disastrous mistake and doesn t realize it yet."

"His biggest venture into online so far was MySpace and he overpaid for it and picked the worst possible time to buy it," Kennedy said. "Thus far his track record is not very good.

"Unless he s got something up his sleeve, then it will be a disaster."

Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school based in Florida, said preventing Google from linking to News Corp. content "doesn t strike me on the surface as a great idea."

"We ll see what happens," Edmonds told AFP. "There s some record of his making pronouncements and then after consulting with his actual operational guys it comes out a little differently."

Google, in response to Murdoch s comments, made in an interview with Sky News Australia, said news organizations were free to opt out of being indexed by the search engine but noted that it drives "about 100,000 clicks every minute" to media outlet websites, generating ad revenue.

"Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search," Google said in a statement. "But if they tell us not to include it, we don t."

Writing at his news aggregator website Newser.com, Michael Wolff, author of a biography about Murdoch titled "The Man Who Owns the News," described the News Corp. chief s comments as the latest salvo in his "war with the Internet."

"It is quite possible he doesn t realize -- and can t fathom -- that removing News Corp. s newspapers from Google means that, in the largest part of the information market, they would cease to count," Wolff said.

Muscat Press and Publishing House SAOC 2009

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