Categories: OLD Media Moves

What WSJ readers want, and why they buy

Dow Jones & Co. senior vice president of circulation Lynn Brenner has come up with a metric that estimates what the company’s subscribers are interested in buying when they purchase a subscription to one of its business news publications.

Rick Edmonds of The Poynter Institute writes, “Brennen proposes five attributes to measure ‘a consumer’s willingness to pay.’ She also assigned a percentage weighting to each.

“Keep in mind this is a measure not of what people would like to have as they consume news, but what they will actually pay for. What advertisers want is outside the scope of this particular exercise.

“Brennen’s big five and the weighting she assigned are:

Broad reliability of content — 30 percent
Vertical nature of content — 30 percent
Longevity of content — 30 percent
Immediacy of information — 8 percent
Social ‘trustworthiness’ — 2 percent

“With that established, Brennen turned to the five main platforms du jour for news organizations and gave each a ‘commercial viability’ score.”

Read more here. She gives newspapers a score of 60, websites a score of 38, smart phones a score of 10, but tablets get a score of 100.

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.