MediaNews Says It WIll Follow Rupert Murdoch's Model, Take Content Off Of Google

Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group Inc., publisher of the Denver Post and Boulder Daily Camera, says that he will block some of his content from Google searches when the company starts charging for premium content in 2010.

Singleton told Bloomberg "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 announced earlier this month that he would begin charging for premium content at two of the company's smaller newspapers, "the Enterprise-Record in Chico, Ca., and the York (Pa.) Daily Record." Howard Saltz, MediaNews' VP for content development has said that the paid content model will be expanded to larger papers, including the Post, if it proves successful in the smaller markets.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has recently considered pulling its content from Google and striking a deal with Microsoft's Bing search engine. In a statement to Bloomberg, Josh Cohen, head of Google's news division said that less than 1 percent of news organizations have opted out of Google news service.