Far from protecting online sides of newspaper, I think this would completely kill them. If FR, google, or Linux Today doesn't point me to a site/story, I just don't get there.
I wonder if a news agency could give blanket approval to say google to link to their material? That'd keep them in the search engines. Of course, then everyone else would merely link to the google link... Probably the only net effect would be to up google's hit counts and advertising revenue...
I am sure the papers would give blanket permission to Google and the other search engines. This is targeted to blogs and site like FR. Of course, the daily Kos would probably have permission so that only the lefties would get the news they want to hear.
That feature already exists. It's called the Robots Exclusion Standard. You put a tiny robots.txt file in your top-level directory, containing a directive that tells search engine spiders to go away. All of the ones I'm aware of (certainly Google) honor the standard. That the newspapers are not using the standard proves your point: they don't want to be completely killed. LOL!
If you visit the Wall Street Journal without a subscription, many of the articles are marked "Subscriber Content" and only show you a brief preview if you do not have a subscription. However, if you access them through Google News, the whole article shows up. What gives? Well, WSJ figures being found via search is too good for traffic to pass up, so, if you come from Google, they show you the whole article, even if you didn't pay the $150 or whatever they're now charging for a subscription. However, it turns out if you're running Firefox, you can install the RefControl extension, which you can easily configure to make Firefox claim to have been referred by Google when on wsj.com, even if all you did was click the article on the wsj.com home page. Voila! Free subscription!