The Wall Street Journal, the daily broadsheet for financial types, is getting a tech savvy makeover with a correspondingly high price tag.

As we haven’t yet had time to acclimatize to and whine about iPad app pricing, no one seems quite sure what to make of the leaked WSJ iPad app pricing. On one hand, getting the actual physical paper delivered to you costs about $29 a month. (That version also leaves an unpleasant newspapery film on your hands and can get soggy in the rain- however, the iPad app can’t wrap glass for shipping, so there’s that.) On the other, the iPhone app for the WSJ tops out at $8 a month.

The WSJ app isn’t ad free either- Coke and FedEx have both purchased three month, $400K advertising packages for it. The new content delivery method is a boon to advertisers, too, because they can target the hell out of you based on your browsing habits. It will be interesting to see how this pans out both for the WSJ app itself and the influence it has on iPad content pricing.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few news providers that can really get away with setting the bar this high out of the gate. People who don’t get bored easily already willingly shell out for the paper online, and if they’re planning on getting iPads, this will be cost-effective and probably convenient. However, other iPad app purveyors who follow suit may see interest flag tremendously if they expect readers to drop $218 a year on their content. Remember what happened to Newsday when they put up a paywall?

WSJ on iPad will carry $18 monthly price tag is a post from: The Inquisitr

As a native Long Islander, I was amused when Newsday, our local paper, waded fearlessly and without irony into the ice-cold waters of charging for news on the internet.

I don’t know anyone who has ever paid for a physical copy of Newsday. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I thought they were passed out free on the Long Island Railroad until I was about eighteen. Even in high school, in a year full of stoners, everyone was totally too good for Newsday and favored the New York Times when they could afford it. Still, Newsday felt they would be able to charge for access to their poorly designed and annoying to navigating site, done in dark blue with white print- and not at a bargain rate, either.

Back in October, Newsday decided to charge $5 a week (a week!), or $260 a year for access to news about the Hamptons and Massapequa. And how many people do you think availed themselves of that fantastic offer? 10,000? 1,000? 100? Try 35. Not 35,000, 3,500 or 350. 35 people were interested in paying for access to Newsday content. That’s like, not even half of a single car on a rush hour train from Babylon to Penn Station. Fail.

In fairness to Newsday, a large portion of Long Island has access to the paper without having to pay the online fee. 75% of Long Islanders have either a subscription to Newsday itself, or subscribe to Cablevision/Optimum and are comped access to the site. But that figure of 75% has not been broken down into paper subscribers versus those who get freebies with cable, and most telling is the fact that traffic has dropped significantly since the paywall went up:

According to Nielsen Online, traffic has fallen since the paywall went up. In October, the web site had 2.2 million unique users. After the paywall went up that total fell to 1.7 million and 1.5 million in November and December, respectively.

While I like to mock the very public failure of my very local newspaper, the numbers are a cautionary tale to others who think a pay-for access model (and a ballsy one at that) is going to work any differently in this market. Newsday will continue to hemorrhage funds (the site redesign ahead of the paywall cost $4m) until they realize no one on the internet is going to pay for content they can get for free elsewhere. Unless you’ve got something very unique with a completely dedicated base of readers, it will fail. Spectacularly.

[Observer via Gawker]

So, Newsday, how’s that paywall working out for you? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Expected at some point during the next couple of weeks is the announcement by Arthur Sulzberger Jr, Chairman of New York Times, that the illustrious Gray Lady well be retreating to her petticoats of a paywall. As a side note there have been a few who have noted that this is around the same time that Apple is suppose to be unleashing its tablet computer.

While the announcement might come as soon as a couple of weeks chances are that it will take a couple of months for the change over to actually take place. During that time you can be sure that the freetards and other interested parties will be be raising their unified voices in opposition to the idea. Of course there will be dire warnings of failure and thousands of words will be written prognosticating how long it will be before NYT comes to its senses and tears down the wall.

It’s not like NYT hasn’t been down this road before as noted by Gabriel Sherman at NY Magazine’s Daily Intel blog

What makes the decision so agonizing for Sulzberger is that it involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world. This fall, Keller told the Observer that at some point, the decision is a “gut call about what we think the audience will accept.” Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

With this move the New York Times will be joining other online newspaper operations like The Financial Times as well as the rumored widening move by News Corp to switch its news properties on the web to a paywall access.

In many cases though this move is and will prove disastrous for an increasing number of organizations that retreat to behind a paywall because they are under the illusion that news is finite product. The problem is that the web has proven this to be a totally wrong assumption.

News isn’t finite. It is a constantly evolving and flowing stream of information that anyone can tap into and report and express opinions on. Wherever you turn on the web someone, somewhere is either reporting late breaking news or trying to provide thoughtful commentary.

What there is though is a finite resource of recognizable and brandable names, either individuals or organizations, that bring global eyeballs to the table. It is these people that are really the strength of any news organization as it is their journalistic reputations and editorial opinions that are sought by the person on the street.

It is the ability to create a niche market within a global market of news that is flooded with everyone wanting to have their say that is the real testing ground of whether the paywall method will work. It has worked for The Financial Times precisely because they have voices that people are willing to pay to listen to. However The Financial Times is a rarity of success as a paywall example as they have a recognizable brand that people have always been willing to pay a premium for so extending that to the web really wasn’t that much of a stretch.

Will the same thing work in favor of The New York Times?

Personally I think it does have a shot at working. The New York Times is an iconic brand that is known around the world. While its reputation has taken a bit of a battering over the last few years it still is considered to be one of those few “world class newspapers”. It might not have the same type of niche appeal as the Financial Times but even within the broader landscape of global news brands it is one that people are willing to pay for.

It’s going to be a risky move no doubt but if done right it could work for them. That said though it isn’t something that is going to work for other news organizations. The reason being that regardless of how important they might think they are in the eyes of the Web they are just another news outlet among hundreds of other outlets.

The Web is global in nature and increasingly the news is being separated into two types – global and hyper-local, anything in between is just news that anyone is capable of reporting or opining on. The thinking that by moving these run-of-the-mill news outlets behind a paywall is going to save them is flawed at its core.

The only thing it will result in is – in the words of  Tom Friedman: “I used to read you before you went behind the wall.”

The New York Times to retreat behind a paywall is a post from: The Inquisitr

I like newspapers, really I do. I like stopping at the newsstand and having a look at the headlines and then carrying on my merry way.

Now if I’m not the type of person who is willing to fork over 2 bucks for a dead tree version of the news what idiot news publisher thinks I, and thousands like me, are going to fork over anything to read the same thing online.

Apparently Lionel Barber, a brain trust editor at the Financial Times, does because he has predicted that within 12 months “almost all news organizations will be charging for online content”. Now whether it will be a per article micropayment or a monthly subscription is still up in the air but be forewarned folks you’re going to have to pay to get your news online.

Barber said last night that the Financial Times had pioneered the concept of a "frequency model", giving access to a limited number of articles on the web before asking users to subscribe.

"We are seeing sustained and growing revenue as a result of our strategy of premium pricing for quality, niche global content – crucial at a time of weakening advertising," he added.

"Many news organisations are following suit in charging, latterly the New York Times which had previously come down in favour of free access to its own content."

Source: Guardian – Financial Times editor says most news websites will charge within a year

Of course he couldn’t let the interview go by without making the obligatory slam against bloggers as being anything remotely similar to real journalists even though he did admit that us lowly bloggers have broken a story or two. In general though Barber says

"do not operate according to the same standards as those who aspire to and practise crafted journalism. They are often happy to report rumour as fact, arguing that readers or fellow networkers can step in to correct those "facts" if they turn out to be wrong. They are rarely engaged in the pursuit of original news: their bread and butter is opinion and comment."

This from an industry that invented tabloid news and semi-naked women on inside pages so they could sell more papers. Sure .. okay …

At what point will news exec’s get a clue? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Financial Times announced Monday that it is eliminating 80 positions from its staff worldwide.

Around 20 positions are editorial, and the rest a mix, including streamlining duplicated jobs caused by previous acquisitions.

The Financial Times’ John Ridding said in a memo to staff that the move was about streamlining the business: “We are deepening integration in our print and digital operations, combining some operations with our recent acquisitions and simplifying some of our processes to increase efficiency and deploy resources in line with our objectives. ”

The Finanncial Times’ last cut was October 2008 when 60 people were made redundant.

(img credit: The Guardian)

Financial Times Cuts 80 is a post from: The Inquisitr