News Corp., AP Push for Online Pay

BEIJING (TheStreet) -- Bolstering their attempts to put a lid back on the Pandora's Box known as the Internet, two of the globe's most powerful media bosses voiced frustration with the online news-distribution status quo.

According to a report from the Associated Press, News Corp(NWS) head Rupert Murdoch and AP chief Tom Curley told an audience at the World Media Summit in Beijing Friday that it was time for aggregators, bloggers and search engines that use news freely to atone for their sins by paying up.

"Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said, according to the AP's own report on the summit. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content."

Curley has recently indicated that the AP is pondering an early-mover system that would provide news content exclusively to certain subscribers before the rest of the world (30 minutes has been cited as a possible timeframe), though Curley provided little further detail on the idea Friday.

Murdoch, a fervid proponent of payment models for news content, contended that without an industry-wide move to paid content online, it will be the traditional news organs "who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph," the AP reported.

The AP already licenses stories and images to sites like Google(GOOG) and Yahoo(YHOO). (Like all news organs that subscribe to the AP's service, The TheStreet, too, pays for the newswire's content.)

The report also noted that the AP is planning to test a news-tracking system that will alert them of unlicensed use of content on the web.

-- Written by Sung Moss in New York

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