Categories: OLD Media Moves

Judge rules WSJ can change online subscription price at any time

Jeff Roberts of PaidContent.org reports Friday that The Wall Street Journal‘s parent, Dow Jones & Co., has run a ruling allowing it to change the terms and price of an online subscription contract at any time.

Roberts writes, “The subscriber agreement allowed readers of the Wall Street Journal to access Barron’s Online for free but, in January of 2006, Dow Jones required readers to pay an additional $20 for ongoing access to the financial publication.

“The law of consumer contracts typically does not allow merchants to change prices on the fly. The judge may, however, have sided with Dow Jones because 79 percent of the WSJ’s approximately 400,000 online subscribers did not access Barron’s at all.

“The judge also found that Dow Jones didn’t abuse a provision in the subscription agreement that permitted it to make changes to fees and services:

”There is no evidence that Dow Jones used the discontinuance provision to deprive plaintiffs of an unreasonably large part of WSJ Online’s content, and there is no reason to interpret this provision as permitting such extreme behavior.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.