NWS News Corporation

By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Keach Hagey 

News Corp reached a three-year deal with Alphabet Inc.'s Google to license content from its publications and produce new audio and video products for Google platforms, News Corp said Wednesday.

Google is paying the media company tens of millions of dollars over the course of the deal, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Don Harrison, Google's president of global partnerships, said content from News Corp publications would be available on several platforms, including a new product called Google News Showcase. News Corp owns The Wall Street Journal and news organizations in the U.K. and Australia.

News Corp will also make new podcasts that will be available through Google's voice-assistant technology and new videos for YouTube, the technology company's video-streaming service. The audio and video content won't be exclusive to Google, the person familiar with the matter said.

The agreement will have "a positive impact on journalism around the globe as we have firmly established that there should be a premium for premium journalism," News Corp Chief Executive Officer Robert Thomson said in a statement.

Executives at major news organizations -- including News Corp -- have long criticized Google for using news content in its products without paying the publishers that provide it. Google has argued that it benefits publishers by sending them traffic and until recently has resisted paying news organizations licensing fees for their articles.

The deal comes as the Australian Parliament began debate on legislation intended to compel digital platforms to negotiate to pay for news.

Facebook Inc. said separately Wednesday that, as a result of the legislation, it would restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content.

Google News Showcase, which has yet to launch in the U.S., will display summaries of news articles from a variety of publishers. Users who click on them will be taken directly to news organizations' websites. The program first launched in Germany and Brazil and has since expanded to other countries including France and Australia. Mr. Harrison said News Showcase already had partnerships with more than 500 publications around the world.

Google last year said it would pay publishers a total of more than $1 billion for three years to license news content.

News Corp properties that will join Google News Showcase include the Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and the New York Post; the Times, the Sunday Times, and the Sun in the U.K.; and the Australian, news.com.au, Sky News, and multiple metropolitan and local titles in Australia, the company said Wednesday. The publishers will offer a limited number of their paywalled stories to Google users free through News Showcase as part of the agreement.

News Corp has been looking to compete with Google News, launching news aggregator Knewz.com in early 2020.

News Corp will create content for YouTube and will get both licensing fees and a share of advertising revenue, according to the person familiar with the matter.

The media company also has agreed to create content for Google's voice-assistant technology, primarily through its expanding podcast offerings and U.K.-based radio and digital-audio division Wireless Group, the person said. Google will pay licensing fees for this audio content as well, the person said.

Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade organization that represents publishers, said News Corp's deal with Google shows the importance of laws that allow publishers to be compensated fairly by tech platforms such as Facebook and Google. Mr. Kint supports the Australian legislation, which he said would put publishers and tech companies on more equal footing during negotiations.

"You can correlate Google's News Showcase deals to where they actually have regulatory risks or new laws that force them to the table," Mr. Kint said, referring to Google's licensing efforts in France and Germany, where Google has faced organized bargaining efforts from publishers.

Other tech giants have moved to pay for news content in recent years. In 2019, Facebook said it would pay news organizations including the Journal -- in some cases millions of dollars a year -- to license their headlines and story summaries for a news service. Also that year, Apple Inc. launched its own news app, Apple News+, which for $9.99 a month provides access to articles from hundreds of magazines and news organizations including the Journal.

News Corp has long been a leading voice demanding that big tech companies pay news organizations for their news. As far back as 2009, Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch criticized the way that others on the web were monetizing the company's stories, writing in a Journal opinion article, "To paraphrase a famous economist, there's no such thing as a free news story, and we are going to ensure that we get a fair but modest price for the value we provide."

In 2018, Mr. Murdoch floated the idea that tech platforms like Facebook should pay news organizations for their content much the way cable companies pay carriage fees for the channels they carry.

News Corp and Google have been able to negotiate their differences in the past. Before he became News Corp's CEO, Mr. Thomson had called news aggregators like Google a "tapeworm in the intestines of the internet." But in 2017, he praised Google CEO Sundar Pichai after the tech giant ended its "first-click free" program, which Mr. Thomson had said disadvantaged publishers with paywalls.

"First Click Free" had allowed readers to access paywalled articles if they encountered them through Google's search engine, and some publishers complained that if they didn't participate, they were punished by ranking lower in search results.

--Benjamin Mullin contributed to this article.

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com and Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 17, 2021 16:53 ET (21:53 GMT)

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