News Corporation has moved into the “second phase” of its plan to charge users for access to content across its newspaper websites, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The paper obtained an internal email sent by News Corp’s digital chief executive, Richard Freudenstein,  reassuring staff that research had been conducted into the proposed change to paid-for content, and the company was proceeding to the next stage of development.

Earlier this month Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said it was unlikely that a paywall model on general news websites would prosper because of the ubiquity of alternative news sources.