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Media

The End To “Free” At The Wall Street Journal

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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camMonopoly_wideweb__430x325,0It costs money to subscribe to the print edition of The Wall Street Journal. The price is $2.29 a week to be exact. The newspaper also charges for its $1.99  a week for its online edition.

The best no-cost way to get WSJ content has been on handheld devices like the RIM (RIMM) Blackberry devices and Apple (AAPL) iPhones.

The Journal is going to cut off free access to mobile readers and plans to charge them considerable fees. People who subscribe to the print edition will have to pay $1 a week to see the Journal on their smartphones, and $2 a week if they are not print subscribers.

WSJ is taking a chance by charging for the content on mobile devices. A number of people may simply stop using their phones to read the paper. Those readers are valuable to advertisers. If there is signficant attrition among them,  the WSJ.could lose a lot of revenue.

But, Rupert Murdoch has said he plans to charge for the online content that his companies produce. His firm, News Corp (NWS) ,is setting itself up as the leader in the “pay for all content” corner of the media industry. In the case of WSJ he may be right. In the case of The New York Post, he may not be.

Murdoch may find he is simply trading new subscription revenue for lost advertising revenue, making his plan a zero sum game.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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