Danny Sullivan, a long-time search engine maven, has this to say.  (Newspapers?  Clueless?  Gasp!  How can it be?)

“World Association Of Newspapers Dislikes Search Engine Exploitation, Clueless About Robots.txt Banning

Newspapers want search
engines to pay over at News.com covers the
World Association Of Newspapers planning
to challenge the “exploitation of content” by search engines. Apparently search
engines are taking newspaper content for free and repacking it up within things
like Google News and Yahoo News. A task force to study the isssue is being
formed, DMNews reports in

Newspaper Group Questions Aggregation of News Content. Reuters also has
coverage

here.

Hey WAN. Don't like being in search engines? Tell your members to put up a
robots.txt file to block
the search engines, and they'll be happy to drop them. When they do, then blogs
and other news sources can have the traffic the search engines were previously
sending to your members.

FYI, I'm trying to finishing a rundown on what the New York Times has been
doing recently to gain search engine traffic. Watch for that soon. In the
meantime, see this past
post about
what Marshall Simmonds did for About.com and is now doing for the NYT.