The new owner of the Tribune company has an interesting idea: stop letting search engines grab their content "for free":

It's time for newspapers to stop giving away their stories to popular search engines such as Google, according to Samuel Zell, the real estate magnate whose bid for Tribune Co. was accepted this week.

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"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Zell said during the question period after his speech. "Not very."

If Zell wants his paper to not be indexed, it's pretty simple - he can have his web monkeys modify the robots.txt file (which Google honors), and bam - it'll stop. The problem is, with the indexing gone, no one will find his papers. This isn't a simple problem - and I'm not sure there's an answer that involves anything that looks like the legacy business model, either.

Update: Jason Calacanis points out the many, many things that Zell doesn't understand - and how the reporters covering the story didn't get it, either.

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