Faced with an online culture that promotes openness, sharing and expression, news organizations are now scrambling to restrict the online Twitter, blogging and Facebook habits of staffers. According to various industry trackers, big publishers like The New York Times, Washington Post and Bloomberg have all informed employees to watch it when it comes to Web 2.0.

For example, according to LA Observed, Washington Post reporters were told via memo to, “Consult your editor before “connecting” to or “friending” any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources.”

Bloomberg employees can no longer “publish Web sites, blogs other online journals that discuss companies, people or topics covered by Bloomberg News…” according to Valleywag.

The New York Observer (via Valleywag) claimed that New York Times editor Bill Keller opened a recent newsroom address by warning attendees not to tweet the proceedings:

Before we get going, I'm going to say something I perhaps should have said Monday, when we did our digital update in this auditorium...You wouldn't Twitter something you overheard at the coffee cart without asking. You wouldn't Twitter the Page One meeting (although it would probably get you thousands of followers.) So I'd be grateful if you would lay down your Blackberries and iPhones, and treat this as a conversation among colleagues.

It will be interesting to see if this crackdown results in any high profile violations and terminations. The whole crackdown reminds me a bit of how reluctant the film and music industries were to embrace new technologies and distribution methods like Napster and bit torrent.

Of course, “news” is a less tangible product than a song or film, but if authenticity and transparency are driving force behind success in the blogosphere and social media realm, how narrow is the vision of media outlets trying to rein it in?

The New York Times reported Thursday that Google has begun running relevant text ads on Google News, a practice the search giant avoided for nearly six years.

So why is this news? Because initially, newspaper publishers were weary of Google’s news aggregator (a service that collected headlines and clips of major – and minor – newspapers, linking users to the online story’s respective site), thinking that Google was essentially building a competing news site using the newspaper’s existing content. To help ease publishers’ fears that Google was stealing money from the newspapers, big G refrained from placing ads on Google News search results.

And that just changed, owing to what Google claims, via the New York Times, was an approach that delivered contextually relevant ads. I’m guessing they also thought it would turn a profit.

Google long maintained that its use of headline and snippets were in accordance with fair use copyright laws. Do they undercut that claim once they start making money through their “fair use” of the content? Will they share a piece of the profit with the ailing newspaper industry? After all, Google depends on a thriving newspaper industry to keep Google News viable.

That all leads to the confounding and circular chicken/egg logic behind the issue. To be a success, Google News needs fresh content from newspapers that in turn need pageviews via aggregators like Google News because no one is buying the print product that ultimately feeds the beast.

The fact is that both Google and the news industry is trying to make money off of something the news industry is giving away for free. Only now, Google may have figured out a way to do it.