A Google-Fu Master Unlocks the Wall Street Journal. Or, How I Know Subscription Model Won't Work for Online News

Though I possess the technical skill of a herring I easily accessed the text of a Wall Street Journal article that the newspaper's website requires a subscription to read in its entirety. In the hope of saving the news gathering industry a lot of grief and money I'm going to tell them how I did it. And in the hope of saving the news gathering industry, period, I'm going to urge them to seek a different business model than one that prohibits readers from reading complete stories unless they become subscribers. You might as well try to carry water in a sieve.

It started with an item on a British website called Book Trade News, to which I have a free subscription. Every day or so the site emails me a digest of book industry-related stories, some of which I select as possibly blogworthy.

Today I received the following item: S&P Cuts Bertelsmann Ratings On Debt Levels, Ad Woes. The subhead was: Ratings closer to junk territory. If anything is blogworthy, the reduction of Bertelsmann's Standard & Poor ratings to near-junk certainly is.

To follow up on this intriguing hint, I clicked on the hotlink that took me to Book Trade News's website. There I found this short abstract:

Standard & Poor's Ratings Services cut its ratings on international media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG closer to junk territory, saying declining advertising will hurt results this year.

The rating agency also noted Europe's largest media company's leverage is high for its rating level, BBB.

The abstract was followed by a hotlink to the source of the story, "Wall Street Journal item". I clicked on it and got the same tease followed by a hotlink that said, "To continue reading, subscribe now". When I clicked on it, I was taken to a page offering various subscription packages and their costs.

Okay, fair enough. But I wondered if I could get around the requirement to subscribe. Out of curiosity I copied the opening sentence of their teaser, pasted it into a Google search box, and hit "Enter". It took me (in 0.26 seconds) to a page of Google listings: the very first item displayed was the exact same opening line of the Journal story. I clicked on it and was taken to the wsj.com page. There I found the complete text I was looking for, but it was overlaid with graphic material that appeared to be intended to block my reading or copying. Now what?

Determined, I highlighted the entire page, copied it and pasted it into a Word document. The junk that had obscured my view disappeared and the text came out clean, legible and - free!

To make sure this wasn't a fluke, later in the day I tried it again. This time Google took me to the same wsj.com page but without the garbage: the complete and unabridged story (actually a Dow Jones item) stared me in the face. I did not have to pay a dime to subscribe.

You can read the Bertelsmann story in its entirety by clicking on the above hotlink.. But that's not the point. Here's the point: as passionately as we all long to see the newspaper and magazine industries survive, I'm skeptical that restricting stories to subscribers will work. As much as I hate the Information Wants to Be Free concept, it's unrealistic to think that information can be withheld from determined seekers. All the more dismaying is that an apparently secure system yielded to a complete amateur. Yielded, in fact, with scarcely any resistance at all.

My technical guru has since informed me that the procedure I instinctively followed is called Google-Fu, which Chris Perillo defines as “the ability to quickly answer any given question using internet resources, such as a search engine. It’s a Zen concept, if you will. The better and faster you become at finding the right answers quickly online, the higher your 'Google-Fu rating'”. Check out his video explanation of the term to a chat-room caller.

Here's the bottom line: information must either be locked up behind an unassailable firewall or we have to find a different way to monetize it. Armed with nothing but my trusty mouse, I laid siege to the Journal's firewall and it came tumbling down in moments.

I'm no Houdini, but at least I can now run with with the geeks. When they ask me what was my finest hack, I'll shrug modestly and say, "Wall Street Journal. Yeah, I Google-Fu'd it. Piece of cake."

Richard Curtis