New York Times Should Charge for News, Google Too: Janet Guyon

Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google Inc., spends a lot of time talking about the economic state of the news business, partly at the behest of the Federal Trade Commission, which wants to know how free online access has contributed to the financial difficulties of dozens of newspapers such as the Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

That Google has anything constructive to say may seem counterintuitive given that many folks who run large news organizations -- News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, for instance -- say that Google and its search engine are the principal cause of the declining advertising revenue at most print publications.