As you may recall, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch began talking about blocking search engines and news aggregators a couple months ago. This escalated discussions that have essentially been going on for over a decade about the online news industry and fair use.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is hosting a 2-day workshop on "Journalism and the Internet Age" today and tomorrow. Featured at the event are a number of high profile media executives and gurus. The cast ranges from News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch to Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington.

As you’ve more than likely heard by now, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in an interview last week talked about the possibility of blocking search engines from indexing News Corp. publications’ content. While this may or may not actually happen, it is one of the latest (and biggest) examples of a publisher taking the position of search engines hurting them rather than helping them.

There’s a chance that the content produced by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and a number of other important organizations will soon become impossible to find using Google.  Rupert Murdoch indicated in a recent interview that News Corp. may block search engines.

In a recent interview we wrote about this morning, Rupert Murdoch indicated that News Corp. may block search engines from indexing its sites.  Now, it doesn’t exactly look like Google’s going to offer money to him (or throw a fit) in response, as the search giant’s more or less replied by saying "fine."

As you may know, Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp., is saying he may block search engines from accessing the organization’s content. He expressed this notion in a recent interview.

If Murdoch were to act upon this, it would mean theoretically that you would no longer be able to find Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc. content on Google. Of course that would be in a world where scraped content isn’t frequently crawled by search engines.

Way back in 2006, MySpace and Google signed a three-year deal that was supposed to have the search giant become the social network’s exclusive search provider in exchange for $900 million.  Now, unfortunately for MySpace, around $100 million of that amount isn’t going to change hands.

It looks like two significant social networks aren’t going to change hands anytime soon.  Executives representing News Corp and AOL have, with different degrees of forcefulness, expressed their intentions to retain possession of MySpace and Bebo, respectively. 

News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch said on Thursday that newspapers must find a way to charge for online content to make up for declining ad revenue.

"People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that’s going to have to change," Murdoch told attendees at the annual Cable Show event in Washington, D.C.

Murdoch cited The New York Times as an example, saying it has a "very, very good Web site." He said he did not believe the paper would make any money online unless it changes its current business model.

There’s no escaping it: News Corp had a rough quarter.  Rupert Murdoch thinks times will be tough for a while, too.  But even as the media giant posted some bad numbers, it turned out that at least a couple of its online properties are working well, with MySpace and WSJ.com making impressive amounts of money.

Rupert Murdoch said yesterday that online subscription revenue at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones could increase by $300 million a year up to the next three years.

The News Corp Chief Executive was speaking at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia press conference in New York said he dropped his plan to make the WSJ.com a free and open site after seeing the revenue projections.

Dow Jones is about as old a company as you’re likely to run into; founded in 1882, it makes at least a couple of countries look young.  It’s staying with the times, though, as Rupert Murdoch expects considerably more than half of its revenue will soon come from digital undertakings.

The good news, from News Corp’s perspective, is that MySpace is continuing to grow.  The bad news is that profiting off social ads is tougher than the corporation had expected.

Rupert Murdoch may end up part of Steve Ballmer’s bid to bring Yahoo into the Microsoft fold, depending on how the deal progresses.

An online-only subscription to the Wall Street Journal usually costs $99, and around 1 million people have judged that to be a reasonable price.  Look for some drastic shifts, though, as Rupert Murdoch intends to lower that first number and increase the second.

The term “ridiculously wealthy” may still apply, but MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson have renewed their contracts with News Corp., and reports indicate that the pair won’t become quite as rich as they might have wanted.

Making the Wall Street Journal’s online subscription model go the way of the dodo could boost the paper’s Internet readership, along with its revenue.