Dow Jones exec: Murdoch premature to state WSJ.com will be free

Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher writes Tuesday that no final decision has been made on whether to make The Wall Street Journal‘s web site free, contrary to statements made earlier in the day by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Strupp interviewed Michael Rooney, senior vice president and chief revenue officer for the Dow Jones’ consumer media group, who said no decision had been made. News Corp. does not close on its acquisition of Dow Jones, the parent of The Wall Street Journal, until next month.

Strupp quoted Rooney as saying: “It is jumping the gun, people are jumping to conclusions here very quickly. We haven’t even closed the deal yet. Mr. Murdoch would like to have the largest, most robust site in business. Free is a way to look at that. But there is a lot of detail behind that. You have to work that out. You don’t just flip the switch.”

Later, Rooney added, “We want to work and be the biggest, but how do we get there? Let’s work things all out and make the right business decisions. The details of all of this are being analyzed, how much revenue would we lose?”

Read more here.

What a lot of people seem to be missing in this discussion is that there’s already a ton of content on the Wall Street Journal web site that IS free to anyone. Making it a total free site isn’t going to change how a lot of people use the site.

For example, I am NOT a WSJ.com subscriber, and yet I go to the site almost every day and can read plenty of content from the paper. And I post links to that content on this blog — something that the advocates of a free WSJ.com say hurts the web site’s ability to attract more readers. I wonder how many of these free Web site advocates have actually tried to go to WSJ.com and read something.