What I hear you saying is...

Scott Anderson at Tribune has posted some funny medicine for the newspapers that complain about search engines "giving away" their content:

Part of the crowd that still thinks opening your content to search engines and "giving it away" is leading to an inevitable fall off a cliff for the newspaper industry? NewsCloud blog has some nice simple code suggestions for you

User-agent: *
Disallow: / 

or slip this in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://latimes.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.latimes.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.latimes.com/ [R,L] 

But ironically, the same newspapers that would consider making this kind of change are IMO also the least likely to execute it correctly, since they've probably never heard of a User Agent, htaccess, or robots.txt.

I worry about the technical knowledge that some of the papers employ. Just this week, an anonymous partner of ours forgot to re-register their domain and was oblivious for several days before one of their readers sent them some mail wondering what had happened to the site. Luckily for them, the registrar still had possession and was able to re-instate. It would have been sad for all if a competitor or squatter had grabbed it.

Technology can be a cruel mistress for those that don't spend a significant part of their day trying to keep up with the latest. So to translate Scott's post in a manner that will hopefully make sense to the uninitiated, here is an image of what your site's traffic will look like after making the changes above:
Photo Credit: jezarnold