Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org has the second part of her interview with Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson and publisher Les Hinton on Thursday.
Here is an excerpt:
One of the habits you’ve been trying to change at News Corp is to take the Dow Jones example of having people pay for digital and extend that. … Do you see an acceptance level coming? Do you think the new News Corp. program, whatever it’s introduced as, is going to make a difference in the way people pay for news?
Les Hinton: There’s not a publisher you can talk to in any part of the world in any language who’s not looking at how they can have their journalism paid for. I think it’s broadly recognized now that in the mid-90s the industry globally took a misstep in being so ready to give its information away, its journalism away as readily as it did. We’re working on several models. The Journal, of course, you know very well, Dow Jones also owns a couple of little local dailies where we’re testing various pay models. Our Brits have now launched both an iPad, which appears to be doing very well, as well as just begin putting a paywall up behind a very, very much improved couple of websites. … That’s the game. We’ve got to establish value, we’ve got to make it worthwhile for people to pay. A lot of other people are doing it.
Thomson: To Les’s point earlier, the core business of Dow Jones is business journalism and there is a propensity for business people to pay wherever they are in the world. The challenge for us is to create verticals with tiering both in content sophistication and price precision. That’s what we’re in the midst of doing with early generation products like WSJ Pro, which people who use it, like it and understand it. It’s instinctive, they understand why they should pay and it’s up to us to give them quality content.
Read more here.
