BBC World News – If you want to get your news for free through the internet, rather than buy a newspaper, at the moment that’s no problem. But it may be a problem soon.

If Rupert Murdoch gets his way, free news on the web would be a lot harder to come by. He wants search engines like Google, which are also known as aggregators, to pay for the journalism generated by his newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Times in London.

Now, reports suggest that Microsoft wants to strike a deal with Mr Murdoch’s company, News Corporation. Microsoft would pay for news articles to appear on its new search engine Bing, on condition they were removed from its rival, Google.

However, the risks for News Corporation include destroying the advertising revenue most news websites depend on if their traffic goes down, because Google users would not be able to find their stories.

Jeff Jarvis is a media blogger and journalism lecturer at New York’s City University, and the author of a book called ‘What Would Google Do?’.

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