The Evolving Newsroom

A melange of links from the past week or so.

News Corp says it will block Google

Jonathan Miller, chief digital officer of News Corp, said the company was planning to block Google from indexing news stories from its multiple news outlets, the Telegraph reports.

When asked how long it would be before Mr Murdoch took the step to block Google, which every media company relies upon to send them high levels of web traffic, Mr Miller said it would be soon – “months and quarters – not weeks”.

He also said that News Corporation, which owns The Times and The Sun newspapers in Britain, could survive both economically and audience-wise without the search giant driving traffic to its sites.

Google said ‘no problem’.

“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. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

There was an attendant wave of speculation on whether it would occur or work. Rick Edmonds on Poynter Online’s Biz Blog wondered if it might be a prelude to a deal as a preferred partner with Microsoft’s Bing.

News Corp to focus more on TV,  less on journalism

Meanwhile, the Independent reports that James Murdoch sees TV as the future and says journalism will play a role but not such a big one.

“In the business of ideas, which is the business that we are in, we do think journalism plays a role, and we do think there are business models there that will make a lot of sense, albeit perhaps not at the scale of some of our broadcasting businesses and other entertainment businesses,” James Murdoch said. “Is it going to be as big a role? No.”

And he added: “Structurally, television is vastly more profitable and a big opportunity.”

A news junkie and his apps

Mrinal Desai, a self-professed news junkie, explains on Techdirt how he keeps track of swathes of news each day. A few useful tips in here on apps he uses to keep track of news on Twitter, web, Facebook, iPhone and more.

Jeff Jarvis on journalism business models

A video of Jeff Jarvis speaking to CUNY journalism students about business models for journalism and the ecosystems that are forming around new forms of journalism.

Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for News 2009 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

BBC makes headlines SEO friendly

The BBC changes the way it writes headlines to make its stories easier to find.

A growing number of users come to stories on the BBC site from places other than our own front page – for example search engines, other sites, personal recommendations, Twitter or RSS feeds.

So our developers have done a bit of work to allow journalists the scope to create two headlines for a story if they want to – a short one which appears on the front page and our other website indexes, and a longer one which will appear on the story page itself and in search engine results.

The front page headlines will remain limited to between 31 and 33 characters and will continue to appear on Ceefax and Digital Text, as they do now, along with the top four paragraphs of each story.

The new longer headlines will be up to 55 characters (with spaces) and will aim to include any key words which we might expect a search engine user to type in when searching for news about that particular topic.