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.