Developing WSJ’s digital strategy

Patrick Smith of TheMediaBriefing.com interviewed WSJ.com managing editor Raju Narisetti about the paper’s digital strategy and the mistakes that other media have made with the Internet.

Here is an excerpt:

How will the digital strategy  of the Wall Street Journal develop?

I think in two ways. We’ll have a very premium, subscriber-led model which is wsj.com, and at the other end a fairly large free-to-consumer model which is Marketwatch, Smartmoney.com and some other sites. So we’ll play in the free and paid models.

The big strategy I think you’ll see is WSJ Everywhere – no matter where our consumers want to consume our content, we’ll be there, as long as they are willing to pay. (WSJ just launched a paid subscription content offer on the Pulse aggregator) You’ll see us do more of that.

You can imagine, if and when Twitter gets around to doing a premium Twitter channel, that would be a great opportunity for us to play in that space as well, and the same thing with YouTube.

Is the point of the free WSJ and associated content to convert people to paying customers?

It’s difficult for people who are not exposed to your content to suddenly become a subscriber, because they’ve not understood the value of the content. The idea is to have a funnel, with an interesting cross-section of free content that shows what WSJ provides, and the idea is to upsell people into subscribers.

The free model also makes sense because in the advertising business you always want to be in the consideration set of big media companies getting consideration from advertisers. To do that you need volume and reach, as well as the elite audience.

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