• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 2, 2006

Hoping to entice consumers to pony up for access, the online edition of The Wall Street Journal Monday dropped its paid subscriber wall until May 10.

The initiative marks the third time in its 10-year history that Dow Jones has held a WSJ.com "open house," making the site available for free and without registration. The previous two efforts--last October and in October 2004--resulted in more than 10,000 subscribers, L. Gordon Crovitz, president of Dow Jones consumer media group, told reporters in New York Monday morning.

Currently, WSJ.com has 761,000 paid subscribers--up from around 700,000 in the fall of 2004; an additional 60,000 subscribers pay for access to Barron's Online. Slightly more than half of the subscribers to WSJ.com also subscribe to the print version of the Journal.

Monday, the company promoted the "open house" initiative by setting up an outdoor booth in New York's Times Square where barkers--some wearing headphones and roller blades--flagged down tourists, inviting them to view the online edition. Today, WSJ.com will take its outdoor campaign to San Francisco, where the online newspaper will distribute passes for free rides on "MUNI," the city's public transportation system.

Dow Jones executives Monday also outlined plans to evolve into "Journal 3.0," its name for future iterations of the newspaper. Later this year, the company intends to roll out MyWSJ.com, which will offer greater personalization and aggregation features. For instance, MyWSJ.com will enable consumers to pull in news feeds from the Journal, as well as a variety of non-Dow Jones sources.

Dow Jones also increasingly will use its online site to break news--posting developments as they unfold, while the print product will focus more on interpreting the previous day's events. Crovitz also said that newspapers' function in the digital era was to provide "an oasis of peace and calm in the mornings," by explaining the glut of information that bombards consumers.