A report on BusinessWeek today by Sarah Lacy looks at the growing trend of Web users wanting to purchase individual news items from sites that normally required a paid subscription. This would be similar to the way the iTunes Music Store allows customers to pay for individual songs as opposed to the entire CD. “A big step toward this goal was taken on June 16, when Yahoo! (YHOO ) struck a deal with a smattering of publishers giving the portal permission to go beyond searching the free areas of their Web sites and into protected zones where readers would need to pay to access content,” notes the story. “As a result, a search for, say ‘Microsoft news’ could turn up a Wall Street Journal article or a Forrester Research report that’s unavailable to the nonpaying public.”