ProJo may charge for site, block Google

PROVIDENCE – The Providence Journal’s parent company, A. H. Belo Corp., soon may start charging people to read its newspapers online and block Google News from indexing their stories, according to a top executive at the company.

Within six months, A. H. Belo plans to start charging for one of its three newspapers: The Journal, The Dallas Morning News or The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., James Moroney, an executive vice president at Dallas-based A. H. Belo and The Morning News’ publisher, told Bloomberg News.

He said the company is still figuring out the right model for an online pay wall. The Journal’s Web site, Projo.com, currently makes all of its content available for free, whereas print subscribers pay $364 a year for home delivery of the newspaper, according to the site.

Moroney said A. H. Belo has not made any decision on whether to remove its content from Google, and a change in policy is not “imminent.” Blocking the search giant would be done as part of a larger strategy for changing how the company offers news on the Web, he said.

“This is traffic that’s not being monetized to any great degree,” Moroney told Bloomberg, referring to people directed to A. H. Belo’s sites by a search engine. “It’s akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.”

The disclosure comes a day after the Financial Times reported that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. was negotiating a possible deal with Microsoft Corp. that would see the media giant’s content pulled off Google and made available exclusively on Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing.

The reported move by Murdoch – who has become a harsh critic of search engines as he tries to return his newspapers, which include the New York Post and The Times of London, to profitability – has set off a fierce debate in the media.

In recent months, A. H. Belo has been making a concerted effort to shore up The Morning News in particular by adding more news to the Dallas paper and raising subscription prices. The Journal also raised prices earlier this year.

None of A. H. Belo’s papers are currently available on electronic-reader devices such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle, Sony Corp.’s Reader or Barnes & Noble Inc.’s forthcoming Nook. “We expect to announce an e-reader solution for all three newspapers fairly soon,” Robert W. Decherd, the company’s chairman, president and CEO, said in a conference call with investors last month.

The Dallas Morning News also recently began selling an electronic edition that lets subscribers read a digital replica of the printed paper in their Web browsers for $12.95 a month. The e-edition uses technology developed by Olive Software Inc.