Interestingly, News Corp seems to be not the only online content publisher that was approached by Microsoft, says this report. Large news publishers were reportedly being courted by Microsoft to de-list their news content from Google’s index.

Another interesting aspect of this issue is of course the fact that Mr. Murdoch who started the attack against Google happens to be co-owner of Microsoft Bing. Now, you see the picture?

And what does Google has to say about this? Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director mentioned was quoted during the Society of Editors Conference – “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue.”

I guess that pretty much sums up Google’s stand.

Original article can be reached here.

Inbal said:

Although we will support your current Google News Sitemap during the transition period of six months, you should re-submit it under the new format as soon as possible. For more details on how to submit your Sitemap using the new format (including how to add new tags to each entry in your Sitemap, to provide more information about individual articles), please visit the Sitemaps section of our Help Center.

Once the transition period is over, we will no longer accept News Sitemaps created using the old format and any old News Sitemaps in your Webmaster Tools account will be rejected.

We encourage you to make these changes as soon as possible in order to avoid interrupting your content’s inclusion in Google News. To get started, please visit the FAQ.

The new format looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:n=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc>
<n:news>
<n:publication>
<n:name>The Example Times</n:name>
<n:language>en</n:language>
</n:publication>
<n:access>subscription</n:access>
<n:genres>pressrelease, blog</n:genres>
<n:publication_date>2008-12-23</n:publication_date>
<n:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</n:title>
<n:keywords>business, merger, acquisition, A, B</n:keywords>
<n:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B</n:stock_tickers>
</n:news>
</url>
</urlset>

For more details on this new sitemap format over here.

Again, you have six months to make this change, but the sooner you do it, the better. ALso, there is a learning benefit to the new sitemap file. Any questions, join the forum.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.