• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 14, 2020

The move would follow Facebook’s decision last year to pay news organizations to license their headlines and article summaries in its news tab.

The report from The Wall Street Journal comes at a time when publishers continue to criticize search engines for not compensating them for their content.

In January, News Corp launched a news site called Knewz that aggregates headlines from more than 400 publishers, such as Fox News, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Anchorage Daily News, and The Sun. It gives readers an alternative to searching and finding news on publisher sites other than from search engines like Google and Bing.

The latest report from the WSJ suggests that most of the publishers possibly in talks with Google are outside the U.S., such as France and Europe.

“The talks are focused on licensing content to appear in a free Google product … details are still being hammered out,” the WSJ reports, citing one source.

Meanwhile, Google has been ramping up its Google News initiative. On Friday the company ran its first post from John Baker, chief reporter in Peterborough, U.K., officially kicking off the second city participating in Google's news initiative announced last year.

Baker explains that the project first partnered with publisher McClatchy and launched Mahoning Matters in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2019.

The site, Peterborough Matters, is the first of three local news sites launched by Archant’s Project Neon in partnership with the Google News Initiative’s Local News Experiments Project. The site focuses on local crime, road accidents, council meetings, and weather to connect the community with in-depth stories about the people, places, and events.