Chinese language site of WSJ is paper’s “future” in China

 TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

BEIJING — The Chinese language site of The Wall Street Journal has about 35 million page views for month and is growing, said Andrew Browne, the chief editor for The Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, said Tuesday.

“This is our future in China,” said Browne, part of a Journal team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. The site averages about 3 million unique visitors per month, and it also has a strong mobile presence with 375,000 iPad, 490,000 iPhone and 250,000 Android downloads.

The Journal started to invest in the decade-old site about five years ago, said Browne in an interview with Talking Biz News at its Beijing office. It now includes market-related commentary and translations of Journal stories, as well as some original reporting. The site has about 20 fulltime journalists as well as a network of stringers and freelance translaters and writers, said Browne.

The paper does an annual survey of the websites readers to determine who they are and what type of coverage they want. Browne said that many of the readers work for foreign companies, are avid consumers of electronics, travel a lot for their job and are car owners.

The site is currently funded by advertising, unlike the main WSJ.com site, which has a paywall.

“So as we develop, we would consider a paywall with really unique content,” said Browne.

Browne joined the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong as a columnist and then moved to Reuters News Agency, where he spent 20 years running bureaus around Asia before becoming news editor for the Asia Pacific region based in Singapore. Browne left Reuters in 2004 to join The Journal as its China economics correspondent