Newspapers around the world will soon have no choice but to start charging for Web content, according to Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton, who called it "madness" to give away "expensive and valuable journalism for nothing."
Media organizations like the Wall Street Journal, the leading U.S. business daily published by Dow Jones & Co., spend "millions and millions of dollars" each week so thousands of journalists can cover the news worldwide, Hinton said at a lecture last Monday organized by Keizai Koho Center in Tokyo.
The WSJ's decision to charge for online content in the mid-1990s "established in people's minds that what we do has value," he said, emphasizing the need for media organizations to persuade people to pay for their hard-earned content.