by Senior Staff Writer – Jason Bean

I wrote an article yesterday for another website that discussed President Obama’s willingness to look at potential government options for assisting the newspaper industry.

It’s interesting how topics of discussion permeate and interact with me lately. Earlier this morning I was reading an article that discussed Google starting to make micro-payments to the newspaper industry.

The information was shared in a report from Google that was given to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) and stated that they would start providing subscription options for readers to subscribe to a variety of news sources through the Google Checkout system. Subscribers would then also be available to get additional news sources as desired through the same system.

In the next year, Google plans to launch a "micropayments" feature as part of its Checkout online payments service, it said in the document. The system could allow consumers to buy a package subscription to several publications and then pay for other stories on an a la carte basis. But in a separate statement on Thursday, Google said it had no specific products to announce yet.

I like this reasoning. In my earlier article I suggested that the newspaper industry just needed to be forced to shift to a more online business model, but that the same revenue streams of advertising and subscriptions could be modified online. If a company like Google could provide additional assistance to make that happen, that’s probably a great thing for the newspaper industry.

The biggest hurdle may still be overcoming the general idea that most people think anything online should be free.