Bloggasm

For years, Google defenders (including Google itself) have been daring newspapers to flip the switch — modify their code ever so slightly as to ward off any search engine spiders and remove themselves from the Google index completely. If Google was such a parasite, then why not simply apply the anti-body? The reason behind this bluff was to extract an admission from the newspapers that they do enjoy the flood of traffic from Google, after all.

And perhaps Rupert Murdoch is issuing a bluff of his own, but recently he said that he was considering turning off the Google hose.

“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” he said. “We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”

There are many who think this would be suicide, but if it is it would be suicide in the name of answering the question we’ve always asked: Can a newspaper survive without Google?

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Back in July I posted about a claim from an Arkansas newspaper that even though its paywall didn’t produce much direct revenue, it resulted in a higher print circulation.

Today we have this piece reporting that the Newport Daily News’ newsstand sales jumped by 200 copies a day after it put its content behind a paywall

But something even stranger happened: after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that’s a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph. “The fact that weather hasn’t been fantastic makes me believe that the pay wall has had an effect,” Lucey says. “We think that more people are buying the paper now that they can’t get it for free online.”

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After the Washington Post’s Ian Shapira wrote a piece complaining of how Gawker repackaged and linked to one of his stories I went ahead and contacted several editors at major dailies and asked them that loaded question: How would you prefer to be linked? I detailed their response in this week’s MediaShift piece: Newspaper Editors Want Clear Credit When Bloggers Link to Them

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HuffPo Readies Sports, Tech, Books Verticals

Arianna Huffington has written plenty of books. And she knows plenty about technology, having recently partnered with Facebook to link her Huffington Post with the social network.

But sports?

Nonetheless, those are three new verticals the Huffington Post is rolling out in the next two months, Huffington told me.

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Editor & Publisher has new figures out today on the top 30 most popular newspaper websites. Knocked from the top 5 is the Wall Street Journal, replaced by the New York Daily News.

This comes as Rupert Murdoch is moving toward charging for content on all his news sites. Could his other properties see similar declines?

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Usually the argument for a newspaper placing up a paywall centers on the idea that users will value the content enough to pay for its online distribution. But when an Arkansas newspaper placed a pay wall up on its own site, it didn’t necessarily care that the wall didn’t produce much revenue:

The economic argument in favor of online paid content is not necessarily in the revenue it can generate on its own, Walter Hussman said Thursday afternoon, but it is in the way paid content can help keep a newspaper’s print circulation up. …

…Hussman said the paid content online generates just one-tenth of 1 percent (0.1 percent) of the newspaper’s total revenue. But the newspaper has been very successful in keeping print circulation up in part because the newspaper is not giving all its content away for free. The Democrat-Gazette’s daily circulation is up 3,000 to more than 176,000 over the past 10 years, while other newspapers in the Southeast are down (some significantly). Sunday circulation for the Democrat-Gazette is down just 1 percent in 10 years.

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