The WSJ Online: irrelevant?

Wired News has an interesting opinion piece entitled Whither The Wall Street Journal? that claims that the WSJ has become irrelevant because their online content is locked behind the wall of paid subscriptions. As a subscriber of the print edition and having grown up reading the WSJ, I can say that the Wall Street Journal is by far the best paper out there. The WSJ is a paper that I’ve always grokked deeply. The type and quality of their brand of journalism is best-of-breed.

At any rate, the article fails to make a key qualification. It’s not so much that the WSJ doesn’t have an impact online; they just don’t have an impact with bloggers. The Wall Street Journal Online has 684,000 paid subscribers, and yet it’s irrelevant? Don’t think so. The WSJ has a huge impact—just not with the crowd the author runs with, which apparently believes heavily in the all-information-should-be-free notion. I’ve always been inclined to believe that there’s a cost involved in getting the best information. (Though that cost may not always be monetary e.g. NYTimes.com registration.)

Is it a risk for the WSJ? Certainly. But I don’t think the problem as framed by the author is unique to the WSJ. Newspapers in general are becoming less relevant—and people (esp. the younger crowd) are getting their news increasingly from TV and online. NYTimes.com gets 9 million visitors daily, but their online revenue is a small slice of the pie. The print edition of the NYTimes is their cash cow. The WSJ has a fraction of that, but the people visiting their site paid for the privilege.

I’ll be the first to admit that reading the NYTimes online these past six or so years has been wonderful. I’ve come across so many great articles and often linked to them on my blog. Do I mention the WSJ less? Certainly. I get the print edition, and it’s harder for that information to make the jump, that is, to go from paper to screen. Perhaps that would be an argument for subscribing to the online edition. (If you get the print edition, the online edition is $39 a year.)

The author besides blogging also mentions online research as another key category in which the WSJ is nonexistent. He cites Google searches as evidence that the WSJ is irrelevant. A question I hear a lot from students is “What’s the proper citation format for online sources?” People have stopped going to the library even to do research. It’s basically what they can do from their dorm room online. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but for undergraduate students doing online research, the low hanging fruit is generally the most attractive. I think that’s true for the blogosphere. A lot of bloggers don’t want to have to work to find or gain access to information. “Who needs to?” they say. With RSS feeds, everything comes streaming right to your desk. There’s no point in having to go find information, and the top 10 or 20 hits in Google can fill in when needed.

Ultimately, as newspapers increasingly become the objects of another era, new sources of information will arise. A site that charges for content rather than being run off of advertising may be the only way to maintain the level of quality that the WSJ consistently has. The WSJ has the best journalists because they can afford to do so. A lot of content is being released on the Internet for free—the Wired article I’m responding to being a good example of that. I think the question is: are bloggers setting the media agenda? That is, would the influence of bloggers be enough to dissuade people from the WSJ?

So what the hell are newspapers going to do?