That ambitious plan is laid out by Springer’s head of public affairs Cristoph Keese in an interview with the New York Times, who sets out the need for a “one-click marketplace” where publishers work with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and other search engines to add a price tag to news artilcle search listings.

Keese says micropayments will work for “noncommodity journalism”, the kind of thing you can’t get anywhere else. But he uses a strange example and argues that pictures of Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi relaxing with his model friends around the pool is kind of thing people will buy: “surely,” he says, this is worth €5 to see…

To readers of the sensationalist tabloid Bild, maybe—but aren’t those readers resourceful enough to find those snaps of Silvio for free via any number of free-to-air news providers or via Google’s (recently modified) first click free programme?

As well as one-off payments, he also wants news orgs to collaborate on a cross-media subscription package. Exactly how the meagre revenue from this would be redistributed—profit share in a holding company? Revenue share proportionate to payments?—is anyone’s guess. But in the mood of commercial innovation among publishers, it will no doubt be something they will consider.

Keese says he wants to work with Google, falling short of backing Murdoch’s charge that the Big G is guilty of “theft”. Delighted by not being accused of being a useless content leech, Google’s senior business product manager Josh Cohen tells NYT that such a plan is possible and an “obvious extension” of the company’s forthcoming digital store for ebooks.

But it’s not all rosy between Germany’s publishers and Google: newspapers there are lobbying Google for direct payments for the indexing of its stories on Google News, citing copyright obligations.

Axel Springer has over 150 newspapers and magazines in more than 30 countries.