Six French newspapers have come together to create an online newsstand where readers will be able to buy and read their content. The initiative, which will be launched in September, was announced yesterday by France's National Daily Press Union as an alternative to Google News, El Paí­s reported.

However, in an e-mailed statement to SFN from Google's French office, Myriam Boublil, head of communications and public affairs, pointed out that Google does not currently advertise on its French version of Google News. Boublil stated that the company's position is that it welcomes "new attempts to find technologies and business models that will help journalism flourish online. We value quality journalism, which is why we work with news partners around the world to help them attract bigger audiences and generate revenue. That's what Google News is all about, and we're happy to see any new experimentation and innovation in this space."

The content's price on the virtual newsstand will be fixed by each daily and several subscription packages to either individual articles or an entire publication will be offered. "The monetization of the web contents, which has been agreed on by the editorial groups, is the main priority," according to Les Echos.

Valérie-Anne Bleyen and Leo Van Hove at Vrije Universiteit Brussel conducted a study of 87 newspaper Web sites in nine Western European countries in 2006, 2008 and 2009, the latest SFN's report, New Revenue Models for Newspaper Companies, reported.

The study categorised the sites into the following groups: free, fee light and fee+. "Fee light" refers to newspaper sites where all the news, columns and archived articles (if available) are free, and where the PDF version is the only paid-for content on the site. "Fee+" on the other hand, refers to sites that offer something other than a PDF against payment.

According to the study, the share of the free news sites across the nine countries increased from 19.5 percent in 2006 to 25.6 percent in 2008. However, in 2009 the growth of free sites seemed to slow, as it only increased slightly to 26.8 percent.

Luxembourg, Spain, Belgium and France are the countries with the biggest growth of free sites. In Luxembourg, the amount of free sites jumped from 33.3 in 2006 and 2008 to 66.7 in 2009. In Spain, the figures boosted from nothing in 2006 to 37.5 percent in 2009.

In Belgium, they grew from 11.1 percent in 2006 to 22.2 percent in 2008. In France, the numbers went up from 9.1 percent in 2006 to 18.2 percent in 2008.

In an effort to increase the popularity of its news site through original content, Yahoo has recruited many journalists from print and online media agencies and opened a bureau in Washington, The New York Times reported yesterday.

The move will bring together original news articles and videos created by its team of journalists on politics and media, and those licensed from the media sources on its news site.

The journalists joining the news division of Yahoo include prominent reporters and editors like Michael Calderone from Politico, Jane Sasseen, a former BusinessWeek Washington bureau chief, and Anna Robertson, an Emmy-winning news producer from ABC's "Good Morning America," along with other journalists hired from publications like the New York Observer, Washington Post, Talking Points Memo and several others, The Times reported.

A similar effort to boost its sports coverage was implemented by the search engine about three years ago, when it hired sports journalists to create original sport content and the acquisition of Rivals.com, a network of sports blogs, according to The Times. However, the original content push initiative came only as a succession to the failure of its expensive ambitious project on original television-style programming.

Google is open sourcing its news experiment Living Stories, the online news format the search giant announced in December. The opening up is a "next step towards better relations with news publishers," Media Guardian's Mercedes Bunz wrote Wednesday.

Living Stories was developed with the Washington Post and The New York Times. The format shows a summary of recent developments relating to the topic, together with a timeline on a single page.

Until now, Google has only had a part in journalism through sending traffic to news sites. "With Living Stories, Google tries to play a further part in transforming journalism into the digital era," according to Bunz.

On average, users spend nine minutes on each story, and most of them prefer the Living Stories format to traditional online news articles, a Google spokesman said, according to paidContent.