Newspapers desperate for ways to make internet pay

As newspapers across the world seek to come to terms with declining ad revenues, editors and owners meeting at the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad this week repeatedly said they must seek more payment for their internet content.

Survival amid the advertising downturn was the leitmotif of the conference, which ended on Friday. Editors and senior executives urged the industry to seize back the online publishing initiative from search engine ''parasites'' living off their work. The remarks were obviously aimed at search giant Google.

This was in the presence of Google Inc's senior vice president and chief legal counsel David Drummond. Other newspaper executives attending included Les Hinton, chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Co (publishers of The Wall Street Journal) and Antoine Vernholes, international director of French sports daily L'Equipe.

With print advertising revenues in freefall for over a year now, newspapers are desperately seeking real income from digital editions. As a case in point, Hindustan Times, one of India's leading dailies, has just launched an edition on e-reader Kindle.

But all these efforts are undermined by the fact that search engines led by Google make it easy for individuals and organisations to access (and use) newspaper content for free. Attempts by some publications to charge readers for downloads have not proved very successful so far.

For most editors and chief executives in Hyderabad, the villains of the piece were the search engines, which they insist are ''stealing their stories'' without sharing advertising revenue.