We’ve been doing some more digging on the definitive moves by Microsoft to woo newspapers over to Bing and away from Google, a story we broke two weeks ago.
Since then there have been some follow-up by various media outlets, notably the Financial Times this week which confirmed that Microsoft had had discussions with News Corp to “de-index” its news websites from Google.
Who approached who first? The FT said the impetus came from News Corp, although our information is that Microsoft is also talking to a range of newspaper publishers in Europe as well, such as German publishers like Axel Springer.
So here is what our sources are coming up with.