Search results matching tag 'Financial Times'

Economist is a natural for paid content

255762 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:39:00 GMT

On hearing the news this morning that The Economist is to charge for news content across its site I was wondering why they waited so long.

The Economist is a natural for paid content in the same way that the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are. They are likely to end up being select members of a very small paid content club. With the power of the distinctive Economist brand and loyal readership (talking of, which check Campaign's "How the Economist changed tack to attract new readers"), I think it can successfully leverage the kind of analysis and insight it offers in to a paid content model.

The Economist.com website currently gives away its news and charges for its archive in the way that the New York Times once did. I'm betting that was not a huge money spinner.

Yvonne Ossman, publisher of The Economist, who confirmed the move to Media Week says they looked at a number of payment options, including an iTunes-style micropayment model. It's going to be interesting to see how this works and how quickly they get it going.

She also says that she's not "sure others will follow suit". She's right about that, of course, as mostly newspapers can't charge as much as some might like.

The most interesting development around at the moment for newspapers seems to be the club idea that The Guardian, The New York Times and others are exploring. The idea seems to be gaining ground.

Steve Outing has a blog post on how Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly (yes he of much right-wing Republican nuttiness) and his team have created something called the BillOreilly.com Premium Membership package (there are 16 reasons to become a member, apparently).

While the website for his show 'The O'Reilly Factor' is mostly free, he is now offering more for serious O’Reilly fans. Some of those people are very serious -- although shouldn't always be taken as such. O'Reilly and his people are serious as well as -- he's charging $49.95 a year or $4.95 a month (must be why there are 16 reasons to sign up).

As Outing says, "this is exactly the model that many newspaper and magazine publishers have been talking about lately, though many are having trouble figuring out what they’ve got that they can charge for".

Would love to write more, but boy am I suffering from a double whammy: right finger recovering from dislocation and now struck by man flu (I don't think its swine flu, but don't get too close).

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FT: people will pay for general news content

255762 — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:54:00 GMT

There is a longish piece in the New York Times over the weekend looking at The Financial Times and its paid content strategy. The paper quotes John Ridding, the chief executive of the FT, insisting that people will pay for general news content.

It's a sort of Field of Dreams approach. You know, charge them and they will p(l)ay approach. I'm sure Shoeless Joe Jackson is on his way. There is an argument that if you say it enough you will convince not only yourself, but others out there as well (I'm not sure it is a very good one though).

From the NY Times piece:

For other online publishers seeking to charge readers, the big question is whether consumers would be willing to pay for general news, as opposed to specialized financial news.

Some analysts doubt it, but Mr. Ridding said he thought they might. “I sometimes think there’s too much fatalism around — people throwing up their hands and saying it’s not possible for general publishers to charge,” Mr. Ridding said. “I think it is possible, and necessary, for them to charge.”

It's a tag team approach. Ridding's comments come a couple of weeks after Financial Times editor Lionel Barber told Channel 4 News why news organisations have to act now and charge for online content (and how they can do it like the FT).

More interesting that Riding's comments, which I think are plain wrong (people will not pay for general news -- lucky for the FT as it does not deal specifically in general news), is that the New York Times ran such a piece in the first place. Maybe the paper was just giving its readers a heads up of the charges that it is preparing to levy although the piece gives no new details on that.

What it feels like right now is like the dam is slowly cracking and any moment now the floodgates will open. Rupert Murdoch is planning some online charging coup and the Guardian Media Group is talking about "members clubs". Whose next?

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Big and bold Murdoch takes the paid content gamble

255762 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:35:00 GMT

Huge sigh of relief has been breathed around the world this morning by newspaper executives everywhere who were all waiting for someone to make the first move and charge for content. Rupert Murdoch has never been a patient man.

Murdoch has made the first move, taken the gamble and the turnpike towards paid content. What is so astounding about today's news is that he is not testing the waters, not finding little pockets of content to charge for, no. He says he is going to charge for news.

More to the point he says he is going to charge for the content that everyone else says you can't charge for. This is game changing and huge...either that or it’s a Titanic-sized disaster waiting to happen.

Potentially this means people in the UK will have to pay to get access to The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times (interesting timing with its new standalone website on the way) as well as Sky News. Not to mention all those other properties he owns around the world from The Australian to Fox News.

Murdoch is not simply talking about his newspaper properties online as he clearly realised that if you are going to charge for one type of online news (say The Times) then you can't very well give away the very good Sky News for nothing. That makes no sense.

Over the past few months Murdoch has been mulling options with his executives. They have been looking at the great success that is the Wall Street Journal and clearly have drawn answers from that. Drawn answers from the WSJ's one million subscribers.

Maybe it told them that it’s a big number, but more important it is a big number with implications for other big numbers: ie the numbers of users visiting its digital properties around the world.

As that sat around those tables, phrases such as subscription charges, premium content areas, e-readers and e-wallets (I'm sure there are other "e's"), and micro payments were all bandied around.

In the end, having seen these options, Murdoch and his team have opted not to trial; not to fiddle while Rome burns; but to move forward on all fronts and charge for it all. Maybe Murdoch was looking at other people writing on the wall and he didn't what he was seeing (Goolge aggregation; Amazon Kindle) as it was all slowly chipping away at his business and the only future that promised was death by a thousand cuts.

It is easy (or easier) to see people paying for upmarket quality journalism. It is here that the Wall Street Journal model gives help hints. So from that maybe people will pay for Times Online and the the new Sunday Times website. I can see people making that case (it is still I think a tough sell), but looking at the popular journalism end of Murdoch's empire (The Sun/News of the World and New York Post) then I would love to hear that case convincingly made as I really can not see it. How Murdoch's freesheet Thelondonpaper fits into all of this is anyone's guess. I mean that is the definition of free.

Whatever the pitfalls that News Corp faces it is a bold move. No one knows what will happen when the paid content switch is flicked. Murdoch's rivals have all made noises. Le Figaro yesterday said it would charge. The Financial Times says it wants more people to pay. The New York Times has said it is "trying to work out how many of its readers would be willing to pay for online content and how much they would pay".

Guardian News & Media is hoping the New York Times will charge… so that it can charge. Right at the start of this year New York tabloid News Day said it would charge online. Looks like it will be joined by the New York Post.

When this happens there could be a massive drop off in user numbers. Gone will be the 21m unique users Times online has and the 25m uniques that The Sun has. Murdoch could fall flat on his face and people will desert his sites in favour of the BBC and to other sites that are still free, but commercial rivals know that time is getting shorter by the day and if this venture shows any signs of success they will have to act.

News groups of all shapes and sizes need significantly more online revenues. Maybe this will be the start of something.

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Welcome to planet FT or how you can charge for content like the pink'un

255762 — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:06:00 GMT

Financial Times editor Lionel Barber has been telling Channel 4 News why news organisations have to act now and charge for online content and how they can do it like the FT. Not sure about that one.

Timing is everything and it's striking that the Financial Times is talking paid content in the week that Guardian Media Group is openly discussing closing the Observer.

The FT, of course, is in a unique position in British press journalism as it already charges for online content. It has 117,000 paying web subscribers – although only 10% of those registered on FT.com pay (like me). The rest view articles occasionally, but never take it any further nor will they (like me).

To begin, Barber says that the biggest mistake the industry made in the past ten years was not to charge users. He says the media was seduced into believing that information was free. Oh sweet seduction.

"We thought that as news organisations we could put our material out on aggregators like Google, attract a big audience and sell advertising on the back of it. In fact what we should have said is: 'No, information actually has a price - it's valuable and therefore we should charge for it.'" he told C4 News.

20:20 vision in hindsight is a godsend, but like the downturn itself no one saw this one coming. At the time free content looked like the logical way forward. The formula of: wide open digital spaces + large audiences = advertising revenues made sense.

Barber justifies his position by pointing to the fact that there are many other sources of free financial news that compete with the FT - such as Bloomberg (you could add Reuters and the BBC). His argument being that despite free content a strong authoritative brand can still win through and establish paid-for barriers.

"In order to adapt to the FT process news organisations will need to have a unique selling proposition - what is it that makes some news organisations special? We think we've been a pioneer in the way we've established a frequency model charging online [we assume Barber means the limit on the number of articles per month non-paying users can access]."

I think the FT has been (and I'm not knocking it) lucky. It almost reversed out of charging a while back as Rupert Murdoch made noises about making the Wall Street Journal free. Had he done that (more hindsight) then I doubt the FT would be in the position it is now in. Maybe more importantly Barber believes the online "mistake" of free content can be reversed and within the next year many news organisations will be charging.

"I think people are beginning to change but it's up to us news providers, the content providers, to make that case. I think there is an inexorable momentum behind charging for content.

"For the simple reason, that (1), the advertising that we relied upon isn’t going to come back in the same way, and (2), that everybody is simply just realising this new internet age, that they need to actually charge for content and establish content as something valuable.

"What I would say to the competition and to the rest of the world is that it's getting late. If we move now we can assure ourselves of a prosperous future."

Barber is right about some of what he says, but he is wrong about the most important bits.

Yes, there is an inexorable momentum and yes advertising isn't going to come back, but he is wrong about the FT being a model for anyone else other than the FT, which is itself a weaker model of the Wall Street Journal, which has one million plus subscribers - ten times more than the FT.

Those two papers exist in a subset, in their own self-contained paid content sphere, and their model is just that. Their model does not apply to general interest newspapers such as The Guardian, The Times or for that matter the poor old Observer. There's no way back. The genie hates the bottle.

We already know people will pay for specialised news (for B2B, financial news) that they can't necessarily get elsewhere. Bloomberg and Reuters like Barber says do pump out a lot of stories, but that isn't the FT's strength, which comes from its authority and its position in the marketplace and its commentary. That's why people pay. At least that is why I think they pay.

I'm not sure where this "prosperous future" that Barber talks of lies. At the moment it looks like only select parts of the bulk of national newspapers could in anyway be charged for. There is simply too much that is free already.

Barber also talked about micro-payments and I'm sure that people will try this along with various other experiments. It is going to be a case of trial and error.

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From KFC to Habitat in the Twitterverse

255762 — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:10:00 GMT

The FT has a quick look at how KFC scored on Twitter and the pros-and cons of promotions.

Americans and their chicken, I will never get that, but KFC knocked it out of the park on Twitter earlier this year (with a few pitfalls) along the way. The fast food chain had agreed a deal with Oprah Winfrey to unveil the company's move into grilled chicken (as part of its healthy push) with details of a voucher on her website for a free meal. That's a lifetime's supply for the queen of TV.

Once Opera gave the word that there was free chicken on offer that's when it went retweet crazy on Twitter. As with other recent promotions such as Moonfruit's recent Mac Book Pro giveaway, which backfired (although they gave 11 away), and Lenovo's giveaway earlier this year, it proved once again that people on Twitter and everywhere like free stuff.

What they don't like, however, is spam. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone warned earlier this month that companies should not use the the micro blogging service "for purely promotional purposes". That's kind of what Moonfruit did and it was ejected from the trending topics list forthwith for breaking that emerging rule.

Stone told PRWeek recently that that corporations must be wary of setting up an account for the sole purpose of pushing out information. "If it is just promotion after promotion - anything that gets toward the realms of seeming like spam - that is a no-no," said Stone. "Make sure people are following your account for the right reasons. If it's done in a spammy way, it's not going to last very long."

Done well these promotions all trend very high (KFC hit the top spot) on Twitter and provide a substantial hit, but the proviso is that you shouldn't be surprised by this and you must be ready – otherwise why do it?

KFC was somewhat taken aback by the response - it shouldn't have been. KFC's website crashed and its restaurants were overwhelmed by demand. Apparently they could not grill it fast enough.

More in the FT piece that also gives a mention to Habitat and its disastrous foray into the Twitterverse with its Iranian election campaign: "#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card".

A terrible idea handed to an intern to do. Remember kids this stuff is too important for that. It's broadcast. Still on the plus side, it gave us much to talk about and @DarenBBC's search for the #habitatintern continues. Will he find the him? Would you own up? Hell no. Who wants "creator of PR disaster for retail chain" on their CV.

So far the bonafide PR disaster has kept Habitat off of Twitter. What it needs to do now is comeback with a genuinely good Twitter promotion/campaign, which will reverse its earlier loss and also demonstrate how quickly fortunes can change in social media.

You really are only as good as your last tweet as this stuff can move so quickly. It might only be 140 characters, but you do, as the FT headline says, have to be careful what you tweet.

More in the FT – "It pays to think before you tweet".

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Bunch of noobs; kid says stuff about web, City amazed!

255762 — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:53:00 GMT

Excuse the exclamation mark, but it’s the silly season, which has to account for the FT's front page story about a 15-year-old on work experience at Morgan Stanley, who wrote a report for the bank and amazed analysts up and down the square mile: apparently kids do not watch TV and Twitter is only for grown-ups. Draw your own conclusion.

I wasn't sure if the front page FT story "Media research note by 'teenage scribbler' causes City sensation" was a joke at first – it has a bizarre New York dateline.

The story recounts that the report by one Matthew Robson impressed the bank so much that it published it as a research note that went on to become "the talk of middle-aged media executives and investors".

The FT quotes Edward Hill-Wood, head of Morgan Stanley's European media team, saying his report proved to be "one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it".

Without being at all insulting, what he told them was the obvious, namely the stuff that you and I and everyone around here knows.

1. Teenagers do not use Twitter. Why? Because no one follows them; and they have to pay to update on their phones.
2. Teenagers don't watch regular television
3. They listen to ad-free music on sites such as Last.fm than tune into traditional radio.
4. Online advertising is "extremely annoying and pointless".
5. They're on Xbox Live and the PS3 playing Halo or CoD4 - just like in the is pic from GotGame.com
6. They go out and do stuff
7. Teenagers do not read newspapers, they can't be "bothered to read pages and pages of text" rather than see summaries online or on television.

"We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day," said Hill-Wood, 35, estimating that the note had generated five or six times more feedback than the team's usual reports.

Is it me or are city analysts just a bunch of noobs? I mean really, I pose that question in all its derogatoriness quite seriously?

Whoever saw a teenager on Twitter other than Miley Cyrus (in case you were wondering about her, she "love rainbows, John Lennon, and Franklin, Tennessee"). If I didn't have a job; I wouldn't be on it either. I also wouldn't blog or possibly get out of bed, but enough about me.

I could go on; I mean don't get me started about online advertising and the waste of space that most of it is (search aside).

As with Twitter and online advertising, I've never thought that TV was really for teenagers. In my mind nothing has changed, I barely remember watching it after becoming a late teen and graduating. Isn't the same true for newspapers?

Me? I'm waiting for the next "City sensation". It has to be better than this one.

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Critics take a swipe at Chris Anderson's new book

255762 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:35:00 GMT

Chris Anderson is not having a good week. It's open season on the Wired editor-in-chief who earlier this week suffered an assault by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker. Today it is the turn of the FT and its message is clear: "Free does not live up to its billing".

Gladwell kicked off an East Coast versus West Coast face-off with his New Yorker piece earlier this week, but you know without the hollow points, in a damning review of Chris Anderson's new book 'Free: The Future of a Radical Price' his follow up to his best seller 'The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More of Less'.

First up, the New Yorker writer dismissed Anderson as a technological utopian who had got it wrong.

"It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards'. Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy.

"Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. 'Information wants to be free,' Anderson tells us, 'in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.' But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?"

Today John Gapper in the FT has a crack at Anderson and his argument that "there really is a free lunch. Sometimes you get more than you pay for" although he says early on it is unfair to dismiss Anderson as a "digital utopian who is in intellectual and financial hock to Silicon Valley companies".

He argues 'Free' is more than propaganda for the West Coast software firms and venture capitalists, who have made their money and hope to make more out of being free although to be fair some have made it by charging you $2000 for a shiny laptop with a picture of a piece of fruit on it.

Gapper says the book is largely insightful. He describes it as "steady and scrupulous analysis of the past and present of free products and services" all at a time when newspapers, who are after all part of this "free revolution", are going out of business faster than you can say "free lunch" as the reporters whose jobs are going (thousands this week alone in the US with Gannett and in the UK with Trinity Mirror) could sure use it.

To borrow from Shakespeare "the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves". The same appears to be true of Anderson. It is not in his writing, which is as engaging as ever, but in the very nature of his sweeping arguments.

Gapper says the problem is that Anderson veers between sweeping statements and balancing paragraphs in a manner that leaves the reader unsure of what he is actually saying.

"It is an intellectual version of a ride in a New York taxi whose driver alternately pumps the accelerator and stamps on the brakes.

"Early on, we learn: The new form of Free is not a gimmick, a trick to shift money from one pocket to another [like razors and blades]. Instead, it's driven by an extraordinary new ability to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero. While the last century's Free was a powerful marketing method, this century's Free is an entirely new economic model'.

"That is a big claim and it never really gets substantiated, at least not at the scale of Mr Anderson's rhetoric. Actually, quite a bit of what he claims to be new appears really to be the virtual equivalent of 'buy one, get one free' or the cheap subscriptions long offered by US magazines."

Gapper goes onto argue that Anderson's vision has two flaws: first, as Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, has pointed out, network effects unleashed by digital technology tend not to spawn free competition among equals but a "winner takes all" effect in which a single company emerges with all the spoils. In the software era, that company was Microsoft; in the internet era, it is Google.

"The second flaw is that, even if the cost of digital distribution is lower than that of physical distribution, the marginal cost of production is not cut to zero. Companies have many costs, from marketing to employing people to make things. Offering things free on the internet is loss-leading just as surely as handing Jell-O recipe books to American housewives was in 1904."

Whatever happens we are all going to be reading this and I for one am looking forward to hear Anderson answer some of these critics tonight "Free–The Future of a Radical Price" 2 July Royal College of Physicians".

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Google drops idea to buy a newspaper what is the industry going to do now!?

255762 — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:23:00 GMT

Did Google ever really want a newspaper? Did it want the New York Times? Well it doesn't now and has told the FT that it is really not interested. Maybe it has worked out that, well, while it can make money out of newspapers they in themselves are worthless black holes.

There had been speculation that Google might buy something like the New York Times and turn it into a charitable trust, but according to CEO Eric Schmidt this idea is as dead, well, as some US newspapers. He also appeared to rule out buying the 19% stake in the paper that is owned by investment firm Harbinger Capital (who are clearly wishing they never bought it).

FT: Would you ever consider buying a newspaper; they’re cheap right now?

Eric Schmidt: We've actually looked at this and we're trying to avoid crossing the line between the infrastructure and technology that Google provides and the content that our partners provide. There is a line and we're trying to stay on our side it.

FT: And so the Harbinger Capital doesn’t hold any appeal for you?

ES: I don’t want to comment about a specific stake and ownership but, in general, we have done well by letting content people do content in their own terms and in their own way, and working with them to try to make some significant money for them.

In short Google wants to focus on the bit of the business that makes money. And you have to get the irony here. Google has risen to fame and fortune to a great extent on the endeavours of others.

It is one of the few firms that have made a lot of money out of content online. That is the truth.

Google is a something of a sneaky operator. Having made all of this money out of content it should in some way now contribute, give something back if you want, for all that it has taken. Maybe buying a newspaper is one way of doing it. I'm sure there are others.

But what does Schmidt have to say about this? Well, as the FT put it, he "played down industry calls for Google to increase the amount of revenue it shared with news organisations whose content appears on Google News".

"We've decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic. So we want to provide incredible numbers of users going to their sites, their content, which is why we urge them to make it deeper, stronger and use better tools and so forth. From our perspective, that’s where the real source would be."

He apparently said that to do this Google would have to take money from “another pocket” to do so. Would that be another really deep pocket? I'm guessing so.

What Google is doing is working with newspapers in some shape or form including The Washington Post.

"With a number of newspapers, and The Washington Post being an example, we are very interested in trying to develop online news versions that somehow address the immediate needs of people and for which advertising works better. Without commenting specifically about products it seems to me that the newspaper that I read online should remember what I read. It should allow me to go deeper into the stories. It’s that kind of a discussion that we’re having.

Schmidt is also clear that as far as paid content goes, it is not going to happen except in specialist and B2B cases, which appears to be the general consensus.

"I think it's [paid content] unlikely to work although people will certainly try it and they’re welcome to do so. And the reason is that for most content people are preferring an advertising model. There will be some very specialised content, you know, high-quality newspaper articles, magazines, that sort of thing, which I suspect subscriptions will work for. But for the average news that everybody gets today they would prefer an advertising-supportive model."

The full transcript of the FT.com's comprehensive interview is here.

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New York Times one of the few that can thrive in a digital age

255762 — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:03:00 GMT

John Gapper in the FT today has a good piece on the woes of the New York Times, but he says the Gray Lady is one of the "few print publications with a good chance of thriving in the digital age".

It has been a helluva week for the New York Times as mogul David Geffen emerged as someone being interested in buying a stake in the New York Times Company and elsewhere it was speculated by Gawker that Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim, could become the biggest shareholder in the New York Times in the next couple of years because of the high interest rates the Ochs-Sulzberger family borrowed $250m at.

Gapper says that while it must be tempting for Arthur Sulzberger Junior to sell up, he says that unlike the Bancroft family who cashed in two years ago and sold the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, he should hang on.

"The family should learn from its mistakes by holding on to the enterprise long enough to clean up its balance sheet and put the paper on a solid footing. Then it should retire with dignity by selling it to someone with sharper instincts.

"Despite the financial errors of the controlling family, The New York Times is not just another doomed US city paper. It is one of the few print publications with a good chance of thriving in the digital age."

He has some praise for the Ochs-Sulzbergers. This for instance, he says they are better publishers than media owners, which has seen them turn a city paper into a national and global brand with a loyal, affluent readership in print and online.

Compare that to the Graham family and The Washington Post, which has lost some of its heyday cache as it has become more local and less an international force.

Talking of newspaper brands that have made a global impact, The Guardian always gets a mention here. Not always like this though as Gapper takes a swipe in his piece, which seems harsh.

"Meanwhile, it [The New York Times] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and- pasting (or aggregating) from others."

Looking towards the future what the paper really needs he says is an owner to best exploit its power and reputation as a force in journalism on and offline. Big question: is that owner person a Mexican telecoms billionaire such as Slim or an entertainment mogul such as Geffen? What does Geffen want with the paper anyway? The kind of owner it needs Gapper says is another billionaire, Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.

"Bloomberg, who is demonstrably attached to New York, has entrepreneurial and financial talent, has a track record of cultivating rigorous and independent journalism, and knows how to profit from digital subscriptions."

What one wonders could Bloomberg do with the New York Times and its digital business? Could he turn a profit? Would he even be interested? All questions for the (near) future.

For now the Ochs-Sulzberger family control 89% of the voting shares, which is a fortress of power, but that fortress is well and truly under assault.

One more thing, I mean really why does the New York Times have 1,300 editorial staff (compared this to the FT which has 550 or The Guardian which will have 800 by the end of the year). Who can survive with those numbers in this digital age?

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Wait and see as WSJ leaps with micro payments

255762 — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:46:00 GMT

So the Wall Street Journal got it moving as it launches first with micro payments after Rupert Murdoch hinted heavily last week. It was the most obvious to go first, but what the industry really wants is for someone else to leap.

People will shortly be able to buy individual articles according to WSJ managing editor Robert Thomson. He said to Reuters: "It's a payments system -- once we have your details we will be able to charge you according to what you read, in particular, a high price for specialist material."

What's as interesting is that the WSJ.com is using the opportunity for expansion. While newspapers around the US totter on the brink, the WSJ.com is pushing out to cities such as Detroit and San Francisco in an effort to broaden the title's appeal by playing up local political and sports coverage on its website.

What's very interesting about that is that it is not the specialist financial stories (the stuff that people already pay a hundred bucks for), but the more general stories that it also wants to get people paying for.

I could be reading that wrong, but it does not seem likely that the WSJ is to push out to these cities and start giving content away. So it is clearly hoping that people will pay for "local political and sports coverage" as coverage in their own local papers go.

Murdoch said last week that he plans to have all his papers charging. The speed of his US announcement could mean that it happens sooner rather than later in the UK.

If and when that happens, things will start to speed up and maybe quite quickly, as if this is going to work, the industry has to do it as a concerted push – to assert this as the new world order, so to speak.

It was the Financial Times, which reported this story about the WSJ, and it must, along with some element of Guardian Media Group (after chief executive Carolyn McCall's comments last week), be a strong candidate to be somewhere near the front of the cue to begin experimenting with charging. At the moment the FT's system of giving some content away really does not work. I subscribe to the WSJ.com and get to read about all I need from FT.com for free. You can always find its content on Google, no payment necessary.

FT.com introduced its current model in October 2007, which at the time seemed to suggest that paid content was coming to an end. It was also when Murdoch was talking about dumping subs charges.

But if anyone is to be next, it will probably be another American newspaper and probably the New York Times. I imagine that is what people are hoping for.

It is all very well seeing the financially strong WSJ leap into the semi dark (for it at least), but what the industry really wants is to see a more general news outlet take the leap and see how it turns out. There is I think a little wait and see taking place. So I guess we will. Wait and see that is.

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