WSJ.com Open House. Free for 10 days

Looks like Wall Street Journal wants to try something new. Online Open House!

For ten days, the website is free. Check it out today at wsj.com

Earlier Jonathan Dube blogged about The Wall Street Journal's deputy Washington bureau chief David Wessel's speech entitled 'Can Newspaper Journalism Survive Blogs, Fox News, and Karl Rove?' at Yale.

Some quotes:

Barney Kilgore was the founding editor of the Wall Street Journal, the man who took it from being basically stock tables to a real newspaper. In a 1965 speech he said, "The fish market wraps fish in paper. We wrap news in paper. The content is what counts, not the wrapper.

"The content is what counts. Whether you get it on newspaper or not is not really relevant, and somebody -- maybe not Dow Jones -- but somebody's going to figure out how to make money delivering your daily newspaper online and getting you to pay for it and getting advertisers to subscribe."

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"What is it that has threatened that model of newspaper journalism? As I mentioned in my title, I think there are three elements. There's technology, there is the polarization of the society, and then there's the use that politicians make of the press.

"The technology one is actually pretty easy to understand. Today there are 1.75 million subscribers to the print Wall Street Journal, a number we maintain only by persistently discounting our subscription rates.

"There is no growth in our print subscription. We have three-quarters of a million paid subscribers to the online Wall Street Journal. That's up 8 percent over the past year. Less than half those people get the print paper. So that's our growth market.

And we know that a lot of college kids only get the news, if they get any at all, by looking at it online, and we know that that's the future.

But the problem is that we cannot charge as much for advertising to a reader online as we can to a print reader. So the unit of Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, that includes The Wall Street Journal print edition, the online edition (WSJ.com), Barron's (a print and online weekly we have for investors), and Market Watch (a free website that we bought that serves people interested in business) that unit of the company had revenues of over a billion dollars last year -- and lost money. Lost $2.5 million.

"Another way to look at it is: We were very smart. We went early to a paid subscription model for our online part of the Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, and we figured that the advertisers would move with our readers from print to online. And we were about half-right.

"The advertisers did move from print to online, but unfortunately they skipped right over WSJ.com and went right to Google. That's no joke. Google, which is a relatively new company, today has revenues in a single quarter equal to what Dow Jones has in a whole year. So we are struggling with a business model that isn't working for us, and we're trying to find a new way to do it."

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"(During the 2004 elections)rumors came into the newsroom of the Wall Street Journal. We checked them out, found them wanting, and didn't publish them. But someone else did. So that creates a situation where, while we're trying to convey information as honestly as we can, as we're trying not to confirm our existing prejudices or your existing prejudices, as we practice the kind of journalism which is harder and less comfortable, other people are able to practice another kind of journalism that confirms prejudices, reports rumors as fact, and gets a lot of attention. So you have the Right watching Fox News and the Left reading the New York Times, and both of them convinced they're getting the right story."

MORE.