The testy relationship between the newspaper industry and the world's largest search engine has been ratcheted another notch. The publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Les Hinton, says Google is "sucking the blood" out of the newspaper business and promises technology to address it.

Hinton, chief executive at Dow Jones, says making content free "gave Google's fangs a great place to bite." He told a conference we'll never know what might have happened if newspaper publishers hadn't gone that route.

But he says Dow Jones is in the final stage of technical development of a platform that will earn permit newspapers to earn revenue from online users.

One of the world's top financial media says another one of the world's financial media has plans this fall to charge for individual articles online.

Financial Times says the Wall Street Journal's existing premium-payment model will be broadened to serve niche-oriented fields like energy, commodities and wealth management. It would expand its premium offering to permit users access to the Dow Jones newswire, essentially taking a professionally targeted product and opening it to the consumer field directly.

It has not yet decided how much individual articles will cost.

The industry has been rife with renewed debate in recent months about the necessity to charge for content currently freely available.  The Wall Street Journal's model has been successful for years, but is one of the few such models to have survived.

From Alan Murray, the Wall Street Journal's executive editor, come five ideas he feels offer the best options for charging for online content.

They include:
1. You need a mix of free and premium.
2. Don't think you can charge for exclusive content if it will be available elsewhere.
3. Don't charge for the most popular content.
4. Charge for niche material.
5. The narrower the niche, the better your chances of charging.

His video for the Nieman Journalism Lab is attached.

The Monday Note suggests looking at a paid online model again in light of media business models under siege. It also suggests that many free services could afford some sort of charge for premium users, but that publishers need to devise strategies to make such models attractive.
At the moment I'm offside on that idea. True, in some cases, offering free services alongside paid ones has stimulated support for the latter by the former. But so much media content is readily available as a commodity, it is hard to gauge where a paid model might enter within the traditional journalism model. Outside that model, with all sorts of functions for a community, it is possible. But I don't see anyone, save WSJ.com, keeping its content behind a firewall --- and even WSJ.com can be found by a reasonably experienced search engine user.

The new WSJ.com debuted Monday night and includes a social network to permit users to join a social network. The Wall Street Journal site, long the standard bearer for paid subscription models online, has decided against freeing the content entirely --- although more is available to non-subscribers. It's hard to determine just how much isn't free, in fact. There will be a mobile application and easier navigation, the company promises.

When Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought Dow Jones, one expected result (of many) was that the Wall Street Journal 's subscriber-supported online model was going to be liberated to become a free service.
For a dozen years wsj.com has been only accessible to the paying customer. A number of other large media organizations, from the New York Times to our own company at Canwest, either compelled users to pay for some access (TimesSelect) or granted access either as an add-on to existing newspaper subscribers or to users who would pay a fee for the HTML version of the paper's eligible content.
Newspapers wrestle with this question on at least two main fronts: there is a value proposition for consumers in a paid-for product (they feel more loyalty to it and feel it is more valuable) and there is a significant revenue implication to abandoning a business model that depends partly on users (and not entirely on advertisers) to pay for journalism. The recent State of the News Media report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism affirmed concern about finding a new business model in the absence of a well-supported advertising-based media organization. After all, someone or something has to pay for news.
Even so, slowly but surely almost everyone has opted with varying degrees of reluctance to join the content-is-free club. Almost overnight the user traffic grows substantially, and in theory that traffic is the foundation to build a successful advertising revenue model to finance newsgathering.
When wsj.com loosened some restrictions earlier this year and permitted editorials, commentary and videos to be freely available, traffic grew by about 40 per cent to 23 million unique visitors a month. It was widely expected that was the first of a few steps to make the Journal's journalism free. Perhaps a premium service with extra content might be preserved for the paying customer, but the  general view was that any month now a free Wall Street Journal would be online.
But it's one thing to give up subscription revenue when you're early in the game, and quite another when there are about one million paying customers.
So Les Hinton, in his first interview as the CEO of Dow Jones & Co. with The Australian newspaper, says it's unlikely wsj.com will be free --- he's not saying never, just not now.

As an addendum to yesterday's posting, today's Wall Street Journal outlines new data from comScore, the Internet tabulator, on the declining click-through rates in the early part of this year for search ads at Google and Yahoo!
Now, it may be that higher pricing more than offsets any traffic slowdown in generating revenue, but the Journal suggests Internet advertising may not be as recession-resistant as first thought in the U.S.