Even as Murdoch caused a stir in the online media universe by announcing Internet users might have to pay to read news from News Corp publications online (via Reuters), Indian publisher Jagran Prakashan has joined Google's News Archive Partner Programme to digitise and offer archives of iNext, its bilingual daily, Exchange4Media reports. At present, Jagran only has an e-paper online for iNext. Inext is circulated in 9 cities - Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, Agra, Meerut, Dehradun, Patna and Ranchi. Google's previous experience in digitising archives includes scanning and indexing old dailies such as Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, and Google News offers archived newspaper content as well. The company says that it will "simply point our crawlers at it and include it in News archive search" and that their content is safe behind subscriptions and payment gateways. It only displays a line or two of the news while aggregating from various publishers and sends readers back to the original publisher's website for more. Some newspapers in the US have even closed down due to dipping ad revenues and news wires such as Associated Press have had to adopt new strategies to keep up (via Forbes). Murdoch has already said that News Corp publications would go paid, and often vented about Google and require users to pay to read and access articles, which would sustain their online business. Whether Jagran should have partnered with Google to upload its archives, however, is a different matter. Though Jagran has various divisions (collated below) that have an Internet presence,…
