Why the WSJ.com charged for its content from the beginning

Shan Wang of the Nieman Lab writes about why The Wall Street Journal charged for its content online from the beginning in 1996, and how 361 of its original online subscribers remain with the paper.

Wang writes, “Looking back, the early days feel almost comically inefficient. The workflows of the online staff and print staff were very segregated. Entry-level staffers might start out as ‘interactive news readers’ (essentially copyeditors), and move on to doing rewrites as ‘interactive news writers.’ Web production was a clunky process.

“‘We had to swap floppy disks between computers. Back then, there were worries that if we tied a web-facing computer into the internal network, we could face external security problems,’ Tim Hanrahan, the Journal’s Washington online editor, said.

“Hanrahan started at the Journal on the original WSJ.com team as an interactive news reader. Both he and Pettit mentioned the early hassle of having two PCs for every desk — one for internal editing and one for accessing ‘The Internet.’ To add a link into a story, a producer had to retrieve the story from the ‘web’ PC, then type out the whole link by hand, Pettit said.

“‘When we were producing the entire Wall Street Journal, we still could really only have one person at a time putting stories on the site and arranging them,’ Pettit added. ‘It would take hours of people passing them around section to section, and things would crash all the time. The file management system we had was incredibly cranky and limited.’

“Print was the backbone of the paper, though over the years, new staffers were added to report original features for the website to complement print coverage.”

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