Yesterday’s Financial Times article about News Corp’s talks with Microsoft made interesting reading. It’s always been a curious fact that newspapers have been happy to see their news content on Google offered for free while their print circulation continues to drop. Why hasn’t the media discussed a Google lock-out before this?

I don’t have an answer for that but I do have one for why its organising now.  Rupert Murdoch’s print businesses - which own the esteemed Wall Street Journal and popular UK tabloid The Sun - reported a spectacular 81% drop in operating income from its newspaper operations in the three months to September.

And its not just Murdoch’s properties that are in deep trouble. According to the US Audit Bureau of Circulation, newspaper sales in the US in the six months to the end of September were down nearly 11% over the same period a year earlier. Similar declines have been registered in the UK.

Still, I can’t help feeling that the Murdoch/Microsoft talks look an awful lot  like shutting the barn door well after the horse has bolted. Microsoft’s search engine – Bing? Bong? - has a 10% share of online searches in the US, compared to Google’s 65%. The loss of links to news (not all, but some) will not cause Google users to desert the site they’ve come to depend on for maps, searches, online photo albums, email, IM chat, etc, etc. Rupert, here’s a news flash: People use Google for a lot more than news.

And looked at from the other side, Google has its uses. According to Experian Hitwise, Google delivers around 25% of the Wall Street Journal’s online traffic. The fact that Murdoch is thinking about walking away from this must mean that his managers haven’t figured out how to make it’s online business pay. And that’s despite the company’s much-admired pay wall. 

The problem, guys, isn’t Google. It’s the print business itself - a business that rather pompously ignored the impact of the web until it was too late.