Over at the Freakonomics blog, there was some discussion of why the Wall Street Journal has a subscription wall while almost every other newspaper in America allows free online access to its news product. Author Steven Levitt opined that someone has to be wrong: the WSJ or the rest of the newspaper industry.
I posted multiple comments, not so much because I had a lot to say, but because the comment engine on Levitt’s blog (probably wisely) strips out HTML tags and properly renders multiple spaces as a single space. (No, I have no idea what the comment engine here does. I don’t comment on my own blog. That’d be kinda onanistic.) But my point was that the WSJ and the New York Times have almost inverse pay/free models and good/crappy products. To wit:
| New York Times | Wall Street Journal | |
|---|---|---|
| News Pages | Spotty (mostly bad) but free | Good but costly |
| Editorial Pages | Spotty (mostly good) but costly | Bad but free |
(One of the nice things about having your own blog is the ability to drill down to the HTML and hand code a damned table when you need to.)
What may be at work here is that the WSJ is an outlier, a special case: a truly national business paper that is unique and can charge for access to its news content because of its intrinsic value. (Well, that and the added value of being from the Wall Street Journal, whose news pages have been above reproach despite the lunacy over at Editorial, probably a far greater achievement than most people realize.)