Wall Street Journal's Former CEO Defends Charging for Website Access

Peter Kann, the former CEO of Dow Jones & Company, the owner of The Wall Street Journal has written extensively in Saturday's paper about why the company decided to charge of access to its articles on its website.  Almost all of the paper's competitors don't charge for access to their material.  Kann starts by explaining the overall concept of the Journal's online material; "Allow me to explain: As a predominantly business newspaper the Journal’s content was distinctive and very largely unduplicated. That content arguably had a much higher degree of essentiality to customers than general news or entertainment. And while the Internet was a new medium, Dow Jones had generations of experience at electronic delivery of news through newswires and news retrieval businesses. So the brave world did not seem so entirely new."

The Pulitzer prize winning reporter then went on to take a shot at television news channels and other news websites by saying; "Television does not begin to fill it. To the extent broadcast networks ever tried they now have abdicated to so-called cable news channels. These, in turn, now devote most of their resources to covering celebrities, crimes and sundry social trivia and to prime-time programming that pretends to be analysis and informed opinion while mostly offering the spectacle of extremist heads yelling at each other. There are few resources and even less commitment to covering significant news beyond floods and fires.

The Internet is not filling news vacuums either. There are hundreds upon hundreds of online sites and blogs that claim to provide news, but virtually none of them even pretend to pursue the traditional news role of newspapers, which is to invest in professional staffs dispersed around a community and across the country or the globe to cover, analyze, and only then comment on, events. Actually, all they do is comment."

Read the whole article here.