Trader Mike

The meme about the WSJ and its policy of charging for online content continues with this article by Wired — Whither The Wall Street Journal? Some key points from the article (emphasis is mine):

Because the Journal sells more ads than it can possibly run, Dow Jones, the Journal’s master, plunked down half-a-billion dollars in November for MarketWatch, which operates MarketWatch.com.

Nevertheless, the Journal faces an intractable problem. Because you have to subscribe to access both current news articles and the archive, the Journal is leaving only a faint footprint in cyberspace. As with The New York Times, which insists that readers register to view news and pay $3 per article in the archive, the Journal barely shows up on …

The New York Times has an article which explores the acquisition interest in financial news sites of late.

Dow Jones won the bidding with a deal, expected to be completed today, for $519 million, about six times MarketWatch’s 2004 revenue. The four-way frenzy among the companies to own MarketWatch outright may be the strongest sign that news and information sites, long thought to be dot-gone relics of 1999, are making a big comeback in 2005.

Many of the same companies that were badly burned by Internet investments before are aggressively bidding for these sites not just because of the growing online ad business but because, like Dow Jones, they are worried that their current Web sites will not be able to …

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about weblogs today and just came across the following about the Wall Street Journal Online and their plans for attracting and keeping more traffic:

At The Wall Street Journal Online, Bill Grueskin, the managing editor, looks at it more philosophically: “How do we make reading news online as easy and elegant and serendipitous as it is in the newspaper? How do you make the Web site even more compelling for people, so it’s a must-read rather than a can-read? And then, once you get them there, how do you sink your claws into them so they don’t want to go away?”

Like his counterparts at other papers, Grueskin is looking at “things in …