Comments on: Rupert Murdoch announces charges for mobile Wall Street Journal reading

By: Garson O'Toole

Garson O'Toole — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:35:05 +0000

FYI: There is a widely known loophole for accessing the restricted content at the Wall Street Journal website. The circumvention strategy is explained in a recent article at the Atlantic website titled "Murdoch's Plan to Charge for Online News Doomed?":

Pssst, I've got a secret! Technically, much of WSJ.com is already paid content. But there's an easy way around the pay wall. Some articles show the first few paragraphs interrupted by a banner asking you to subscribe to read the rest. But! If you copy the headline and paste it into your Google search, the first item under "News Results" will be the full article...free! That means WSJ's subscriber-only content is, well, not subscriber-only at all. Presumably, Murdoch allows this to optimize traffic from web searches, but it's a pretty obvious loophole and one that he'll have to close if he expects enterprising news readers to actually pony up cash for content.

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:38:08 +0000

By charging for content, he will be driving readers away to other papers. With every reader it loses, the paper becomes that much less relevant.

By: EeeReader

EeeReader — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:31:06 +0000

How does charging for content indicate a drive to “strip away all relevance from his paper”?

By: Spider Mattheson

Spider Mattheson — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:58:40 +0000

The WSJ is my favorite daily news paper. I read it just as frequently as the NYT but that will change if I can’t access content for free. There are too many ways to access free content. It just doesn’t makes sense. Same goes for Hulu. As it stands, I prefer to download TV shows so as to have no interruptions from poor streaming speeds when my internet is bogged down. Downloading, while not on the up-and-up, is fast and more convenient than Hulu. Charging for online video would be a bad idea. Downloads and illegal streaming sites are simply too ubiquitous.

Here’s a question, though: will WSJ just be charging to access articles through the application or on their mobile site as well? I’ll gladly browse to their mobile site if that’s what it takes to read the paper.