Murdoch: another brick in the subscription pay wall

Rupert Murdoch says plans to charge Wall Street Journal readers for accessing the newspaper via Blackberries and iPhones will soon be implemented. The pricing - $1 per week for subscribers and $2 for non-subscribers - may not be overly steep but it signals the probable end of the free news era.

What is most remarkable is how rapidly the information-wants-to-be-free movement has crumbled. In a matter of months, news organisations have been disabused of the idea that the old business can translate directly to the web without charging customers. With the Journal leading, all News Corp papers are expected to be placed behind subscription walls by July next year.

Other newspaper groups, including the New York Times, are looking at similar plans. Since no one is certain that readers will want to pay for news they have grown accustomed to receiving free, they only have the music business for reference - and that has turned out so well.

Perhaps Murdoch is correct. Producing news costs money and giving it away for free is by definition reducing its value as a commodity to near zero. Companies that successfully charge, including the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, are widely envied.

But can they be emulated? No one really knows if there is a paid-content market outside business - for, say, News of the World stories or the Daily Mail and its notable obsession with celebrity cellulite.

Nobody knows if there is a market beyond business for paid-for content

While reading a paper online can hardly match the ink-and-paper experience, the Wall Street Journal's application for mobile phones is concise, easy to navigate and fast to load. It's considered a trailblazer, proving that newspaper content can be transmitted effectively on an iPhone or Blackberry - and better in some respects than on a computer screen.

Murdoch paid-content gamble affirms the belief that the advent of Twitter marked a low point for the information business. A moment, like CB radio in the 1970s, when almost anyone could claim an audience regardless of quality: democratic, perhaps, but time-consuming and confusing to navigate.

Murdoch told a conference in New York he ultimately expects readers to consume more news on mobile phones and other portable devices, such as Amazon's Kindle, than on the printed page. "These are very complex times, and news is more valuable to people than it has ever been," he said.

Murdoch's position on paid-content is a reversal of his opinion when he bought the Journal just three years ago. Then, Murdoch said he intended to drop the paper's subscription model. Now, with most news organisations agreeing in principle to charge online, there are at least two methods under discussion.

Google News says it is looking into adapting its Google Checkout service to enable news sites and other publishers whose content is located via Google to receive payment for that content. The proposal involves Journalism Online, an organisation that would act as third-party revenue collectors on behalf of Newspapers, using a unified 'friction free' micropayment system.