I wrote an analysis on Monday about the possibility that News Corp might take its news search results away from Google and list them on Microsoft’s Bing search engine instead. My conclusion: This one isn’t such a hot idea. Then I read John Gapper’s Financial Times item about how it *could* be a hot idea.

To recap, here’s how it would work.

• Microsoft would pay News Corp for the privilege of being the only search engine to carry results from papers including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Times of London.
• Microsoft thinks it can get more people to use its search engine, drawing them away from Google.
• News Corp could punish Google, in essence, for making tons of money from the ads it serves alongside news search results. Why, the thinking goes, should Google make a bunch of money off the news that we produce and our newsrooms go starving and our ad sales tank?
• Other newspaper publishers, if they see Murdoch making it work, might think the same thing and abandon Google en masse.

I and many others wrote that it would be a gamble at best. What if people don’t care that much about news? If the 70 percent of the search market that uses Google discovers  the news is absent, will they switch search engines? Scientists of misanthropy like me say it’s unlikely. If they don’t find it, they won’t seek it.

Gapper at the FT has another way of looking at it:

In effect, (Murdoch) would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing. That suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible. …

Mr Murdoch appears to have decided he will not lose very much by ditching Google traffic and even a fairly small payment from Microsoft would compensate. He is attempting to get distributors to pay for content in the way that US cable operators pay cable networks for programming. …  If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?

In other words: You, Mr. or Ms. Newspaper Publisher, hate Google because you’re in a co-dependent relationship. You need Google, but Google hurts you too, so you want to escape from Google, but you can’t… But think about it this way: How much worse can it be? You’re shedding hundreds, if not thousands of jobs, and you call 25 percent ad revenue declines an improvement over how they were a few months ago. What’s NOT to lose? And if someone’s paying you more than you’re making now?

Not to add too many question marks to one blog post, but does this make Rupert Murdoch the smartest man in newspapers?

Top Rupert Murdoch adviser Gary Ginsberg is leaving News Corp after 11 years, the company said on Monday.

It must have hit New York Times reporter Tim Arango’s e-mail inbox first (his writeup appeared about five minutes before I got the press release).

Here is what he wrote about Ginsberg, 47, the second senior executive to leave News Corp in recent months, following Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin:

Mr. Ginsberg, a former lawyer in the Clinton White House, was hired in 1999 to be News Corporation’s director of communications. He was hired partly to refurbish the company’s image after a controversy in which Mr. Murdoch was said to have stopped publication of a book by Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong, to curry favor with the Chinese government. Mr. Ginsberg’s portfolio within News Corporation expanded well beyond public relations. He gradually gained control over investor relations, marketing and corporate social responsibility. He also became an important bridge between Mr. Murdoch and Democratic politicians, particularly Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Ginsberg, Arango said, arranged a lunch between Bill Clinton and Murdoch in Harlem, and a year later with a New York Post newsroom tour. Eventually, the Post endorsed Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate in 2006 and Murdoch threw her a fundraiser at News Corp’s headquarters. (Yes, that is quite a feat to arrange for a newspaper that under Murdoch has leaned Republican more often than not.)

It’s also a feat to get a well-known Democrat to say what he said in the press release:

I will always be grateful to Rupert for the many opportunities he’s given me over the years… It was a difficult decision to leave a company that has been such a vital part of my life and I’ll miss the many talented colleagues who have helped make this such a thrilling and fascinating ride. But I’ve been thinking about leaving for a while now to pursue something new, and this seemed like the right time to do it.

Teri Everett, who spends plenty of time dealing with the horde of reporters who cover News Corp’s every move, will take over as the new communications chief. Reed Nolte will run investor relations.

The war of words between the news media industry and Google makes for a great spectacle, and this week did not disappoint.

According to a report in the Silicon Alley Insider blog, Associated Press CEO Tom Curley is meeting with Google on Friday to press for the creation of a “news registry.” Here’s SAI on the AP’s move:

It hopes such a registry would propel its content to a higher rank in general search than the blogs that the news agency accuses of lifting its content.

Curley said the AP — which intends to form landing pages and a social-media desk, among other survival strategies — is “getting paid for about 12% of our content on the web.”

It was not clear what information SAI was basing its report of the AP-Google meeting on - the blog post didn’t specify whether one of its bloggers had spoken to Curley directly, or whether it was picking-up Curley’s comments from another report; nor did it have links to any other articles on the subject.

A Google representative emailed a statement that said the company regularly meets with its publishing partners to discuss a variety of initiatives. “We’re not going to comment on the specifics of any particular conversation at this time.”

One would hope Google is also having conversations with News Corp, which is ratcheting up the rhetoric of late.

Earlier this week, News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch told his own Sky News Australia in an interview that he was considering blocking Google from indexing its Web sites once the company begins charging people to read its articles on the Web.

On Friday, News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller expanded on Rupert’s anti-Google gambit and stuck a timeline on the move, according to a report in Telegraph:

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”.

The story later quotes Miller dismissing the benefits that come from have its content accessible through Google:

“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

There’s been plenty of sabre-rattling from the news media when it comes to Google in the past. If News Corp doesn’t follow-through with its threat in the next couple of months, will it have proven itself to have no real clout in this fight?

Lest anyone doubt the thrust of Rupert Murdoch’s speech on Thursday (or was it Friday? I’m losing track of time zones) at the World Media Summit in Beijing, it was all about paying for news — as in: You’re going to pay for news, and if you think it shouldn’t cost you anything, you’re a “flat-earther” and a “kleptomaniac.”

For those of you accustomed to the News Corp CEO’s occasional verbal ramblings and hints of ghosts of suggestions, this was a departure. He has gone on the record in great detail about his thoughts regarding paid news, but this is the first time that I recall him using fightin’ words like “flat-earther.”

Murdoch also “urged the Chinese government to take full advantage of the country’s creative potential by opening the door to media competition and ensuring that intellectual property is protected,” according to the speech and the press release, but let’s be clear — the message that resonated was: “You’re going to pay for news as long as we need to pay people to report it.”

Here’s the Reuters take, “leding” on China.

The New York Times’s David Carr throws in some similar comments from the head of The Associated Press, and says that it and News Corp are “cocking the gun” on free news. Pungent!

And here is the AP’s take on its own story.

Finally, here’s the speech itself. There’s plenty to digest.

Rupert Murdochs Speech at the World Media Summit

(Reuters Photo: Rupert Murdoch on the left, China’s president Hu Jintao on the right. Behind them is David Schlesinger, who runs Reuters News)

Big media executives are developing a new Olympic sport — hedging. Two of the best contenders are NBC-Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in New York City asked both executives on Tuesday if they were interested in bidding for rights to broadcast the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2016 Summer Olympics. Both answered the question in ways that sound different until you realize that they actually sound… the same.

Murdoch said “We haven’t thought about it” and concluded with “I wouldn’t think so.” Zucker said, “We’ll have to see what happens. We’re not going to make any decision that doesn’t make business sense. …. The Olympics are an important part of the company and something we’d would like to be involved with if it makes business sense.”

Murdoch pointed out what would make business sense for both companies: holding the summer games in Chicago. If the Windy City gets the spot, expect the executives to firm up their answers quickly, and come back saying “yes.” That would make a good advertising opportunity for whoever gets those broadcast rights.

However (there’s always a however), the International Olympics Committee doesn’t plan to award broadcast rights until it votes for the city that will host the games. That will be either Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo or Madrid. No sane U.S. network executive is going to show how much they want the broadcast rights before that vote, because they don’t want to make Chicago-sized bids for a Madrid-sized spectacle. So until the IOC votes, expect to hear little more than tepid interest in the games.

(Reuters Photo: Jeff Zucker, très sportif.)

Rupert Murdoch used News Corp's fiscal fourth quarter conference call on Wednesday to say he wants to be paid ANYTIME his news is read online. Perhaps he was just in a cranky mood, but most of the reporters listening to the call thinks he's going beyond what he's said many times before on the topic.

The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made the content free. Accordingly, we intend to charge for all news websites.

That's not just for newspapers and websites, but also for his TV news channels, like Fox, and by implication, Sky, when viewed online, Murdoch said.  However, when asked if he will be charging for celebrity photos from newspapers such as The Sun or News of The World, it was by no means clear he's figured out how to make visitors pay to view these other than by watching ads.

He said he's prepared to be first among his competitors to do this and considering introducing a paid-content plan for News Corp web sites in the company's current fiscal year that ends in June 2010.   

Of course, there's nothing counter-revolutionary about content creators wanting to get paid. It just made the blog posting trifecta work.    

(Transcript: News Corp Q4 2009 conference call, Seeking Alpha; Image: The Sun)                                           

See also Revolution and Evolution

Allen & Co might have thought they were being helpful to executives by shutting out the working press from the usual mingling with the executives at the Sun Valley Lodge bar. Its annual media and technology conference includes the reminder to its attendees that they’re not supposed to talk to the reporters who fly out, uninvited but not unwelcome, to try to get the big guys to talk

Maybe it wasn’t so helpful. At least four CEOs told MediaFile and other reporters privately here that they were less than impressed with the decision. Executives who wanted to speak with individual reporters or hold court with several at a time had to do it outside the bar. And that’s just what many of them did, opting to hang with each other and various journalists in the lobby outside the bar, leaving the wonderful staff of the lodge’s bar to ferry drinks out to the crowd.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt held his annual sit down with reporters on Thursday by the fireplace in the lobby of the Sun Valley Inn, and a bunch of other top movers in the media world from Hearst Magazines chief Cathleen Black to News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Time Warner Inc CEO Jeff Bewkes seemed to think little ill of jawing with the press during cocktail hour.

The hired security at the event said Allen & Co made the decision on Tuesday after someone complained. The decision reversed years of tradition here where the press and executives mingle in the evenings to have off-the-record chats and trade gossip.

On Saturday, the last day with just one (MediaFile) reporter left, the security seemed to relax a little. The head of security told this reporter, “I’m letting you get away with murder because you’re the last guy here.”

Let’s see if we can apply that policy to the bar next year. Everyone can use a little social lubricant, especially executives and the reporters who make their living off covering what they do.

When it comes to wiretapping in the UK, the key question for Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp, is what did he know and when did he know it?

Murdoch’s News of the World is caught up in new allegations that its journalists intercepted mobile phone voicemails of Hollywood celebrities and athletes. British police have said they are not re-opening a 2005 investigation, which saw the firing of then News of World editor Andy Coulson.

Many want to know how far up the chain of command did knowledge of this alleged activity went. So what does Murdoch have to say on this matter?

“Nothing to say at all,” he told Reuters at the Sun Valley conference late on Thursday afternoon.

Murdoch recently promoted The Sun Editor Rebekah Wade to CEO of News Corp’s News International unit based in London. So in light of the scandal, we asked Murdoch if Wade’s job is safe?

“Don’t be silly,” he said gruffly, and set off pretty quickly for a 78-year old media mogul.

(Photo: Reuters/Rick Wilking)

Reuters reporters Robert MacMillan, Yinka Adegoke and Alexei Oreskovic will be sending live updates from the Sun Valley gathering. Read their updates below or follow us on Twitter.

Nearly every powerful media and technology executive you can think of will be camping out in the idyllic and affluent ski resort town of Sun Valley this week. Here are just a few…

Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, Michael Larson of Cascade Investments and Ron Meyer, president and COO Universal Studios arrive at the Sun Valley Inn.

Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and her husband Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActivecorp, arrive at the Sun Valley Inn with Eric Eisner.

Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom, arrives at the Sun Valley Inn with his wife Debbie

Chairman of Liberty Media John Malone (and a gaggle of press)

Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corporation

Herb Allen, president and CEO of investment bank Allen & Company, which hosts the event.

(Photos:Reuters/Rick Wilking)