Johnston owns more than 300 papers across the UK and like many newspapers across the world, it has suffered from a drop in advertising revenues and declining circulation as many readers moved away from print and towards the web. 

 

Earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch, Head of News Corp warned that he would block Google from using news content from his publications, and begin charging for access to content.  In "Treating News Like Oil?" eWeekEurope.co.uk analyses a possible link up between News Corp and Microsoft's Bing, which would see Google excluded from carrying News Corp Content, which has been compared to "creating an OPEC for news".

 

If articles from the Times or the Wall Street Journal could only be found through Bing, people might go there instead of Google.  However, as Danny Sullivan, search engine expert at Search Engine Land, points out that news cannot be controlled through pipelines, and does not flow like oil.  There are a huge number of unofficial blogs which publish news articles, news stories which are syndicated, and users who tweet comments on, and link to, recent news.