Google says it will pay for some "high-quality" stories that it uses due to pressure from publishers.
Part of the initiative will require Google to pay its users to access news otherwise blocked behind a so-called paywall on certain websites.
The first sites to participate in are in Australia, Brazil and Germany, with a product launch expected later this year.
It comes as authorities in some countries investigate how tech companies use news content without paying for it.
Australia has presented plans to force Google and Facebook to pay news publishers under the competition rules.
France has already issued an order to Google to do so.
It's the latest long-standing development with news publishers that tech giants have to pay for them to include "snippets" of news articles in search results or on social media.
Google characterizes its new proposal to solve the problem as a "licensing program" focused on in-depth reports rather than daily news.
In an ad blog post, Google said it would "pay publishers for high-quality content."
Google will make certain articles from subscription news websites available to its users free of charge.
"Where available, Google will also offer to pay for free access for users to read paid articles on a publisher's site," said Google.
"This will allow paid publishers to increase their audience and open up the opportunity for people to read content they normally wouldn't be able to see."
It is safe to say that the relationship between Google and the news industry has been delicate.
Publishers from Rupert Murdoch to the German group Axel Springer have long accused the research giant of benefiting from journalism without being ready to pay for it.
Today's announcement is the latest in a series of moves by Google to change that narrative.
Putting money directly into new content sounds great, particularly if it supports local newspapers in difficulty who are writing important local journalism.
But how the payment plan for free access to paid items will work is not yet clear.
If readers find out that Google will pay to get around the paywall, they may be less eager to pay for a long-term subscription to the newspaper.
For years there has been talk of setting up micropayment systems so that people can buy individual newspaper articles, but these ideas have achieved almost nothing.
Perhaps Google is now seeing how to provide a payment infrastructure to give the news sector a safer future, but this once again raises questions about how much the tech company will play in deciding which news we will all have to read.
The initial batch of publications includes the German group Spiegel, the Australian regional titles InQueensland and InDaily and the Brazilian Diarios Associados.
Google says it is still in discussion with "many more partners" that it hopes will join the program in the near future.
Despite government intervention and criticism from some publishers, the company insisted that its existing products generated "economic value for publishers".
He claimed that his research and news products send readers to news sites more than 24 billion times a month, "giving publishers the opportunity to offer ads or subscriptions and increase the audience for their content."
There are obstacles that push people to pay directly for the news.
The latest Reuters Institute digital news report found that most people in all countries do not pay for online news, despite some success stories, such as in Norway (where 42% do) and the United States ( 20%).
But many people say there is nothing that can get them to pay for online news: in the United States, 40% of people have this opinion, according to the report. In the UK, it is 50%.
