Media conglomerate News Corporation has recently been in talks with publishers about forming a news consortium to better enable the group to charge for news on both online and mobile devices, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

Thanks to its success with its partly paid, partly ad supported Wall Street Journal Online, News Corp. is "a logical leader" to expand that model elsewhere, according to the Times. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller is "believed to have met" with publishers from Hearst Corp., the Washington Post Co., the New York Times Co. and Tribune Co., according to the Times, a Tribune-owned paper.

Earlier this month, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch announced all the media giant's news Web sites will begin charging for digital content by the summer of 2010.

The All Things Digital blog, part of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, owned by News Corp., pointed out that the biggest problem publishers face when switching to paid content is that "a great deal of the stuff we make can be found all over the Web, with little to distinguish it, and the model that used to support this content-near-monopolies on eyeballs and ad dollars-has disappeared. Pay wall or no, that's going to have change going forward."