Wall Street Journal ends free BlackBerry access

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 16 Sep 2009 at 09:11

The Wall Street Journal will begin charging people for its iPhone and BlackBerry apps within the next couple of months, Rupert Murdoch has announced.

The apps currently offer free access to the newspaper's content, but all that will end "in one to two months," Murdoch announced at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York.

Under the plan, people who do not subscribe to the Journal will pay $2 a week for mobile access, and subscribers $1 per week. Subscribers to both the print and online version of the paper will get mobile for free.

Charging for mobile access is one of the boldest ways yet that a US newspaper has tried to increase revenue, at a time when falling circulation and print advertising revenue is threatening the survival of many newspapers.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few US newspapers that has successfully charged for access to news on the internet.

At the Goldman Sachs event, Murdoch said the environment for advertising is "very much better" than three or four months ago, and went as far to suggest that video-on-demand service Hulu may yet adopt a pay-per-view model.