So says the editor of the Financial Times (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/16/financial-times-lionel-barber). 

I respectfully disagree ... the news sites already let that genie out of the bottle ... NOW they're trying to charge for content? It won't work. People will either not read the news from the fee based sites or start frequenting the other free sites more often. I've seen it in my business ... people don't want to pay for information, unless you can convince them that you're adding a ton of value to the content.

Should be interesting to watch, but my bet is on free.

A quick link out to Newssift, a news search engine produced by The Financial Times. The site uses semantic search technology, as well as a bit of analysis on the search results to create an interesting new product. While they don't reveal their content sources (and I wish they would at least provide a list of some sort), they have this statement on their site: "Newssift sources consist of thousands of global business news sources and millions of articles, spanning news portals, magazines, newspapers, news wires, research sources, online news, television and radio, and expert commentary."

I could see this being used for quick searches, current awarenes/monitoring type searches as well as to help refine searches and discover relationships between subjects. 

Check it out at: http://www.newssift.com/index.jsp.