MediaNews Group also considers blocking some content from Google

Bloomberg.com quoted MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton as saying that his company plans to block some content from Google News when MediaNews begins charging readers of two of its newspapers for some online content next year.

“The things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic,” Singleton told Bloomberg.

Privately held MediaNews — which operates more than 50 daily newspapers and their related websites in 11 states — said earlier this month that it will start charging readers of the Chico, Calif., Enterprise-Record and the York, Pa., Daily Record for certain website content in the first quarter of 2010 as a test of the “pay wall” model that may be used at other papers.

Howard Saltz, MediaNews’ VP for content development, said at the time that the pay system may spread to other MediaNews newspaper websites — including the Post — if the Chico and York experiment is successful.

In May, Singleton and MediaNews President Joseph “Jody” Lodovic issued a memo to employees saying that the company “cannot continue to give all of our content away for free.”

MediaNews launched an internal initiative to find ways to charge for some of its content online.

“We continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free,” the executives’ May memo said. “Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business — the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.”

Google News displays an assortment of headlines and sometimes brief excerpts of news articles and allows users to search for news coverage on specific topics. When Google News users click on a headline, they are sent to the website of the news organization that originated the report.

According to Bloomberg, another large newspaper chain — A.H. Belo, publisher of the Dallas Morning News — is also considering blocking some content from Google.

The Bloomberg report comes on the heels of word that Microsoft Corp. may be exploring deals with media content providers — including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — about paying them not to be indexed on Google Inc.’s search engine.

The Financial Times reported late on Sunday that Microsoft has approached several large media companies about such deals that could give its new Bing search engine a competitive advantage over Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). It cited unnamed sources familiar with the talks.