Business

Wall Street Journal Takes Paywall Fight to Mobiles

Dow Jones will start charging next month for Wall Street Journal stories delivered via its iPhone and Blackberry apps — a long-anticipated move spurred on by News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, who has complained as loudly as any media executive that the news industry’s survival depends on getting paid for digital content. The Journal has […]

img_0788Dow Jones will start charging next month for Wall Street Journal stories delivered via its iPhone and Blackberry apps — a long-anticipated move spurred on by News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, who has complained as loudly as any media executive that the news industry's survival depends on getting paid for digital content.

The Journal has always charged for the vast majority of its content on wsj.com and has consistently threatened to charge those who use the smartphone apps it began introducing more than a year ago. So Thursday's announcement is not as dramatic an escalation in the "free vs. pay" battle as it might be for, say, The New York Times to begin charging for its website.

But it does bring the fight to the relatively new medium of mobile apps where, publishers hope, people can be conditioned early to pay for things which on other platforms they have become accustomed to getting for free.

Murdoch has made it something of a personal crusade to set the agenda for the entire newspaper industry. Last month he said News Corp. might begin charging for online content across the board next year, while also threatening to walk away from the Kindle if he did not get better terms from Amazon. He has equated Google News with copyright theft, and Journal publisher Les Hinton likened the search giant to a "digital vampire."

Most major news providers still don't charge mobile users for significant content— in other words, for news that actually would top the day's agenda rather than smatterings of exclusive content intended mainly to induce users to subscribe. These outlets include The New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg and even the AP, which has gone to extraordinary lengths recently to try and make everybody pay for the privilege of citing their stories and linking back.

But the new Journal pricing structure has the benefit of bringing consistency to their platforms, since smartphone users were the only people who had been getting the store for free — and the mobile version will remain free to subscribers of both the newspaper and wsj.com.

For others, access to a broad array of news via a smartphone app will be $2 a week to those who subscribe to no Journal properties, and $1 for those who get either pay for the print edition or the wsj.com. But the fee structure, craftily, will more than likely just drive interested parties into taking all three slices of the pie, since that is the overwhelmingly cost efficient choice.

The math is simple: Print is $2.29 a week a la carte and wsj.com is $1.99 by itself. But bundled, the combined cost is $2.69 — a pretty easy upcharge decision, especially if you had only been taking the paper. Only an extreme tree hugger would choose the all-digital, no-print plan ($2.99, or 30 cents a week more for fewer options), and I can't think of anyone who would take the paper + mobile access, eschewing wsj.com, for $3.29 — $52 more a year than you have to pay for all three.

But, ironically, another strategy could be mobile only — at $2 it is as cheap as possible to have access to the full whack at the Journal experience, in your pocket. And it's an open secret how to access Journal articles online for free by searching them out in Google rather than going to the site itself.

Any way you slice it, the new pricing model is a vastly more friendly approach to attracting new business than Journal rival the Financial Times, which remains almost completely locked down. Its iPhone app (trashed here) allows access to three stories every 30 days, or 10 if you give them your e-mail address.

The Oct. 24 transition from free promises to be a little rocky, however (we asked for, but cannot get, what will probably be an upgrade to the iPhone app. Full disclosure: I subscribe to both the print and online editions, so for me mobile access will remain free). Starting next week messages will appear on the app saying that "a separate mobile subscription will soon be required for full access to subscription content," Dow said in a release.

A spokeswoman said that people who do not choose to subscribe in some fashion will continue to get that small amount of content that is currently free on the app, which is a subset of the content that is free via a browser. But all available mobile stories will be referenced, tagged with a key icon to indicate pay content, and it will be possible within the app on each of these stories to start a subscription — a frictionless point of sale approach.

One last thing: The announcement was supposed to happen next week, but Murdoch preempted himself by talking about it at investment conference.

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