The Wall Street Journal is expected to begin charging nonsubscribers micropayments for access to individual articles, according to a report Sunday in the Financial Times.
Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told the newspaper that "a sophisticated micropayments service" will launch this autumn. The system would charge small fees to occasional users who may not be willing to pay more than US$100 a year for a subscription to the WSJ.com, Journal's Web site, Thomson told the Financial Times.
The Journal is one of the few large daily newspapers still managing to charge for online content. The New York Times abandoned a two-year experiment with the Web-subscription model in 2007, suggesting that the company's projections for subscriber revenue were small compared with advertising sales.
Word of the payment model emerges as the newspaper industry is undergoing a dramatic contraction. As readers have increasingly gone online for their news, papers have suffered declining subscriber numbers and lower advertising revenue. Many newspapers have announced staffing cuts in the past couple of months, and some have warned that they may face closure soon if they can't enact further cuts or find buyers for their operations.
New York newspaper Newsday announced in February that it plans to begin charging online readers for access to its content.
Publishers are also taking aim at search engines and news aggregators. Earlier this week, Google defended itself on charges that it is profiting from content produced by newspaper executives, magazine publishers, and The Associated Press.
During a Senate hearing, Google VP Marissa Mayer said, "Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that Web traffic to increase their readership and generate additional revenue," according to her prepared testimony.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
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