Rupert Murdoch again raised the prospect of ditching subscriptions for the Wall Street Journal online yesterday, hours after the New York Times dropped charges for premium sections of its website.
As the trend gathers pace towards free-of-charge news publishing on the internet, Mr Murdoch suggested he was leaning towards making the Journal site free once he completes a $5.6bn buyout of its owner Dow Jones.
The Journal is often held up as a rare example of a paper with premium content that can afford to charge without losing too many readers. It charges an annual $99. Mr Murdoch told a conference in New York that making the site free would help boost readership and revenues. "If you make it free, it will hurt the paper? - I don't think so," he said according to a Reuters report. He added: "That looks the way we're going." ...
Vivian Schiller, general manager of NYTimes.com, said the change was motivated by a shift towards search engines for finding news in cyberspace. The volume of traffic funnelled through search engines such as Google News and Yahoo! was so great that the newspaper had concluded it could maximise advertising revenue by throwing open the entire site.
Some of the NYT's star columnists have been calling for their writing to be available to the widest possible audience. Since the paper introduced charges two years ago, 227,000 paying subscribers have signed up, generating $10m annually.
Comment. If this becomes a trend, it won't directly spill over to scholarly journals, which can raise much less money from advertising than newspapers. On the other hand, their expenses are much lower and there may be some indirect spillover, for example, through new user expectations and better data on the connection between free online access and heightened impact. See my February 2006 article on advertising as a supplementary (not necessarily sufficient) source of revenue for OA journals, and on Google AdSense ads as a way to avoid both the real and the perceived problems of editorial corruption.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/20/2007 08:15:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
