Murdoch forming syndicate against free web

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The Associated Press has already made it clear they intend to charge bloggers for simply linking to their content. Now News Corps Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller has met with major news publishers including New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp., and Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times, to convince them to form a syndicate that would collect fees for news distributed online and on portable devices.

"The reality is that unless a lot of people who produce news act in unison to start charging for content, then individually they will fail," said Alan D. Mutter, a former newspaper columnist and editor and consultant on new media ventures.

LATimes:

Steve Brill's Journalism Online initiative garnered attention this spring when it announced plans to create the tools to allow publishers to collect fees for digital distribution, and recently announced that more than 500 newspapers had joined. Others who have been offering competing approaches in meetings with news executives include Borders Books and Webvan co-founder Louis Borders, according to people who have attended the briefings.

The notion of charging for digital access to news, either online or on devices, has been gaining momentum ever since the Associated Press' annual meeting in San Diego in April. William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP and chief executive of MediaNews Group Inc., railed against the "misappropriation" of news on the Internet -- a reference widely interpreted as a swipe at search giant Google Inc.

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," he said. "We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore."

Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Thomson added to the invective, saying Google and other news aggregators who believe that content should be free are "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet."

The hot rhetoric has yielded to more cold-eyed assessment of how to make money from the digital distribution of news. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch said in an analyst call this month that he hoped to "build significant revenues from the digital delivery." News Corp. is among the world's largest newspaper publishers, as the owner of the New York Post, the Times of London and nearly two dozen papers in Australia.

The formation of this syndicate is an overt attempt to monopolize news content across the web; it reduces competition and is in violation of antitrust laws.