The world’s second largest media consortium may soon withdraw its news content from the world’s largest search engine in a face-off that may come to represent the clash between traditional and new media.

News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch told reporters that his newspapers may soon fly under Google’s radar when the company begins charging for online content. The media mogul said that what news aggregators like Google do amounts to stealing:

As well as Google, he criticised other sites like Microsoft and Ask.com for…taking a free ride on its content – “the people who just simply pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories … without payment”, he claimed.

This announcement came just three months after Murdoch declared that the company would be charging for all of its websites by the summer of 2010. News Corp owns America’s most widely read newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, as well as many other top market titles in the U.S., Australia and Britain.

Some media experts have warned against the fee-based model that Mr. Murdoch has embraced.

With 200 million Google search queries a day, the news industry’s content — all of it — should be part of Google’s results. Let’s face it, most Internet users don’t search newspaper website archives until they’ve given up finding the information they want on Google

Mr. Murdoch, however, is confident that the fee-based model will go further in generating advertising revenue–even if readership declines–because “readers who randomly reach a page via an internet search hold little value to advertisers.”

“There’s not enough advertising in the world to make all the websites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying.

“There are no news websites or blog websites anywhere in the world making any serious money, some may be breaking even or making a couple of million.”

Referring to people finding News Corp stories via search engine websites, he said: “When they click it, they get the page with the story that’s in our paper.

“Who knows who they are or where they are. They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content.”

Google News allows readers to brief the headlines of the day. Search results generally allow readers the chance to read the page’s opening paragraph before skipping to the next story. Mr. Murdoch may have the typical Google News user pegged:

Publishers do not feel that the click through rate to articles is high enough, and therefore any additional advertising revenue that they would gain from extra viewings of individual articles does not compensate for the income they lose from readers not going direct to their newspaper websites. For Google News search results, the click through rate is only about 10%. People scan headlines and the brief article excerpts that appear but then few seem to bother to read full stories

News Corp is not the only news publisher that is frustrated with Google’s approach. One European publisher has taken to the courts to recoup losses, allegedly resulting from Google News:

Belgian newspaper copyright group CopiePresse is in the process of seeking 49 million euro in damages from Google for storing and reproducing Belgian newspapers’ articles without permission.

The World’s Editor Forum takes a more conciliatory approach to Google. Charging for content would only work, writes Emma Heald, if done “universally”–not just by one media mogul. And the American legal system is less friendly to news publishers than those of Europe. So what is to be done?

The more likely way to beat Google, Ms. Heald says, is to borrow the model:

One further non-confrontational solution could be for newspapers themselves to provide more aggregation, such as the NYT’s Times Extra page: an alternative homepage which includes links to articles from other sites under the Times’ own stories. The Washington Post has a politics-specific Political Browser which freely links to other publications. If newspapers embraced this linking further, they could succeed in providing significant competition to aggregators.

The newspaper may be down, but it is not out–that is, unless the industry finds an approach that works. Whether it is one of these three remains to be seen.