• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, January 14, 2008

The Wall Street Journal is slowly inching down the paid barrier to its online content, as new owner Rupert Murdoch publicly flirts with the idea of making the whole site free.

Last Thursday, the European edition announced a new Web site feature allowing visitors to read editorials and opinion columns for free. The new free offering also applies to the American edition. The move could be described as testing the waters, as it is unlikely to result in a huge jump in traffic. The paper's opinion section, self-described as unabashedly conservative, operates separately from its core mission of business reporting.

In addition to the editorial and opinion pieces, WSJ.com is also posting clips from Fox News, another Murdoch property. This is the first open sharing of content between the two parts of his News Corp. empire, presaging further integration between The Wall Street Journal and the new Fox Business News channel.

Murdoch has publicly mused about opening the entire Web site with free access, a move encouraged by analysts who say it will boost traffic substantially. Last fall, Fitch Ratings urged newspapers to drop subscription barriers, arguing that "online platforms provide the opportunity to increase the shelf life of newspaper content and allow companies to potentially sell more advertising against a given article than is possible in print."

The New York Times, a competitor in the national arena, finally dropped its last subscription wall (around TimesSelect, which included opinion columns) in September 2007.

However, other analysts are skeptical. Spencer Wang of Bear Stearns recently estimated that a free WSJ.com would have to attract fully 12 times the current online traffic of the subscription site to make up the lost subscription revenue with ads.