The Case for Charging to Read WSJ.Com

The first of two parts. The second is here.

February 2005 was a tough month for those of us who worked at the Wall Street Journal Online, where I was in my fourth year as managing editor. A slew of media experts were telling the world that we were making a mistake of historic proportions by keeping WSJ.Com a paid site.

The criticism usually followed the same route. First, the author would invoke the obligatory paean to the Journal’s historic greatness. That would be followed by a tsk-tsking that the Journal had walled itself off from the “conversation” and thus was en route to irrelevance, followed by obsolescence.

Then, the elixir: Take down the subscription wall, make the site entirely free, and rake in those huge mounds of advertising revenue (time frame for that TBD, but trust us, it’ll come) that will more than compensate for the sudden absence of circulation revenue.

So, author Michael Wolff told a software trade group that February that the Journal was once “one of the truly astounding information franchises.” But then, he invoked ominously, “something happened” in the mid-1990s. “The Journal kind of disappeared. The Journal went out of the conversation as a point of influence….It seemed to, if not stop existing, at least stop mattering.”

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