Even before Rupert Murdoch’s bid for The Wall Street Journal was clinched this morning, the online media industry was buzzing. Will Mr Murdoch pull the plug on subscriptions at the Wall Street Journal Online, turning it into a free, ad-supported digital paper?

Dow Jones management has resisted this approach for years, despite the obvious appeal of increasing the traffic overnight by several multiples and reaping the benefit from increased advertising. This may very well be the first thing that Mr Murdoch addresses in the new era of a Journal owned by News Corp, which is also the parent company of Times Online.

I can recall, back in 1997, sitting on a “future of media” panel in Manhattan with a Journal Online chief playing the naysayer role. He told the crowd that the site would remain defiantly paid-for. The justification at the time was that the Journal Online was on the brink of turning a profit, so why mess with success? There were plenty of doubtful people in the crowd, myself included.

Dow Jones has been reluctant to break out the figures on the Online Journal, so we don’t know with any certainty how, if at all, profitable the net version of the paper is. We’re told by the publisher, L. Gordon Crovitz, that the site expects to reach its millionth subscriber this year. That could be read as a compelling argument to keep the Journal Online, for the moment, a subscription site: paying $99 (£49) per year for a subscription, works out at an income of $99 million. Not too shabby. But traffic-wise, a million unique visitors puts The Wall Street Journal in Division B among news sites, thus begging the $99 million question: how much ad revenue is Dow Jones leaving on the table by not opening the entire site up free of charge?

Mr Murdoch himself lobbed this question last month in typically provocative fashion when he told Time that he could envisage scrapping not only the subscription component of the Online Journal, but the inky, dead-tree edition as well.

"What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world?" he asked. "Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts. And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you'd make ... a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and The Times make very little money now."

This $5.6 billion (£2.8 billion) deal may finally inject a healthy dose of realism and inevitability into an industry that has been reluctant to admit it.

From the day Netscape blinked to life, the business of running a daily newspaper inexorably changed. With print readership plummeting, the subscription and newsstand prices for today’s daily paper should be seen as nothing more than a subsidy for print and distribution costs – it pays the freight of the ink, the presses, the trucks, but little more. This harsh economics lesson continues: because you cannot charge more for a product that fewer people are buying, it will be nearly impossible to raise the subscription and newsstand cost in the future, and thus this subsidy will pay for less and less of the production costs. To call this “new economics” would be unfair to Adam Smith, but still this realism is forcing all media companies, from Dow Jones to EMI, to rethink, and possibly scrap, pricing in the digital era.

Yes, the News Corp bid for Dow Jones will mark the end of an era in the newspaper business – the end of paying for news. There will always be specialist content – long-form narrative journalism you find in The New Yorker or second-by-second price fluctuation reports offered from the likes of Reuters or Dow Jones Newswire – that people will continue to pay for. But in this era of online news aggregators, 24-hour-news stations, stay-at-home bloggers who fire off five-line updates of every news headline, why should some newspapers insist we pay to read their version the following morning?

Free or subscription? This is a question newspapers seriously had to grapple with ten years ago. Today, the real question is: should we even keep the print edition alive? No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. For unprofitable newspapers, it’s an awfully tempting idea.

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Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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