Barron's online editor: Financial journalism moving online

Howard Gold is leaving Barron’s Online after editing the Internet version of the financial publication for nearly a decade. In his farewell column, Gold revisits six predictions he made in 1998 about the Internet revolutionizing the media landscape, notes The Media Stock Blog.

Here are a couple of them, courtesy of Media Stock Blog, since Barron’s Online requires a subscription.

1. “Within a decade,” I wrote, “the Internet will become the primary means of getting financial information.”

The numbers of people visiting the big personal finance websites — roughly 10 million unique users per month each for Yahoo Finance and MSN Money, eight million for AOL Finance, according to Nielsen Net Ratings — far eclipse the numbers who get financial information from newspapers, magazines, newsletters and financial television shows.

5. “News is already a commodity online, but original analysis isn’t.”

With so much good information available free, it’s still difficult to get people’s attention — or their money. But we may be at an inflection point: The 750,000-plus subscribers of the Online Journal, the initial success of the New York Times’s paid TimesSelect and our own strong debut as a separately paid site (with more than 50,000 subscribers in the first month) may mean people finally are ready to pay for “the original insights and ideas provided by the best sites and news organizations,” as I wrote back then.

Read the rest of the Media Stock Blog’s analysis of his predictions here, including a discussion on the importance of blogs in financial journalism.