Brazil's major newspapers have collectively opted out of Google News after the search giant refused publishers' demands to pay for indexing their article headlines and excerpts.

All 154 members of the National Association of Newspapers in Brazil (ANJ), who collectively represent 90% of the country's newspaper circulation, have pulled their content from Google's news aggregator, according to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Google, as the company has argued elsewhere, believes it shouldn't have to pay to include content because it sends so much traffic to news sites — approximately 4 billion clicks per month, a Google spokesperson said at a media conference in São Paulo last week.

But publishers don't believe that's enough. "Staying in Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences," ANJ president Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto said in an interview with the Knight Center. "On the contrary, by providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our web sites,” he said.

The move comes as several international news organizations, attracted by the growth prospects of Brazil's growing and increasingly affluent middle class, up their investment in the region. Earlier this month, the Financial Times launched a dedicated mobile web app for Latin America, and established a print site in São Paulo so that subscribers can get same-day access to the FT's print edition. The New York Times is planning to launch an online, Portuguese-language edition for Brazilian readers next year.

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