Wall Street Journal Plan to Nickel and Dime Subscribers Could Force Bloggers To Become Pirates

The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of capitalist journalism, has concluded that the Information Wants To Be Free movement is tantamount to the end of civilization, and the paper will begin charging micropayments for articles and subscriptions, according to Financial Times's Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Kenneth Li. Robert Thomson, WSJ's managing editor, says the "sophisticated" scheme will be launched in the fall.

"The move will position the Journal as the first big newspaper title to adopt a model many are studying cautiously as they seek to reduce dependence on plunging advertising revenues," say the Financial Times reporters. You can read about it in WSJ plans micro-fees for online articles.

What makes the Journal's proposal sophisticated? For the answer we turn to a recently created venture called Journalism Online, whose tenets are being studied by a number of newspapers in the hope of finding a solution to the drying up of ad revenue watering holes and the defection of subscribers to online news sources. Here are the essential talking points from Journalism Online's press release:

• First, Journalism Online will develop a password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.
• Second, Journalism Online will aggressively market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for those consumers who want to pay one fee to access all of the JOI-member publishers’ content. Revenues will be shared among publishers.
• Third, a key initiative of Journalism Online will be to negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.
• Fourth, Journalism Online will provide reports to member publishers on which strategies and tactics are achieving the best results in building circulation revenue while maintaining the traffic necessary to support advertising revenue.
  

Bloggers - pay particular attention to point #3, because it puts you on notice that you may not be able to quote, or even access, content without paying a toll. As a fair user of such content I have some serious concerns about this restriction. And, as a crusty cynic, I am quite skeptical that a news publication's content can be so airtightly controlled. The effort to restrict it might have the ironic upshot of forcing bloggers to become pirates. Even those of us who agree that information wants to be paid for may, out of self-defense, become Informationwantstobefreeites.

Click here to read the venture's press release detailing its business model and operational format.

The Journal's micropay innovation may be only the first step to a shift to an all-digital news delivery format instituted by Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp of which WSJ is a component. We recently conjectured about Murdoch's keen interest in ordering an e-reader to carry News Corp's papers and magazines, or developing one of his own.

Richard Curtis