In an effort to show it cares about the financial free-fall of the news media partly because of how difficult it's been for news producers to get consumers to pay for their products on the Internet, Google says it has made it a little easier for those companies that want to block consumers from getting all that content for free.

Essentially, Google wants to make it easier for news companies that want to charge for their content to prevent web surfers from getting around pay walls.

On one of its blogs this week Google said it has modified its First Click Free program. Previously, if you went found headlines from subscription sites like The Wall Street Journal through Google's search engine or news pages, you could read entire articles without limitations.

Google said it has modified the program so that a news provider can limit the number of articles a news consumer can read for free to five a day.

As Josh Cohen, Google News' senior business product manager, wrote:

If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day. We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.

In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as "free" any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking. We will then label such stories as "subscription" in Google News. The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free. Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it.

 

Cohen's posts coincided with two days of discussions at the Federal Trade Commission on the topic "How Will Journalism Survive The Internet Age?" (We're waiting to hear if the participants found an answer.)

Google's move comes amid complaints from Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp. which owns The Wall Street Journal, about Google and news aggregation sites taking his company's free content and making money off it withot News Corp. getting a cut.

The Google move also comes as Murdoch and Microsoft have reportedly talked about partnering to thwart Google's indexing of the News Corp. news websites.

Google's changes would give Murdoch a little more control over his content. But that may not be enough of a concession to stop his belligerence towards Google.