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Adam L. Penenberg writes in todays Wired News about how the Wall Street Journal is running into problems with its online strategy and I couldn’t agree more with his analysis. He says that because the paper doesn’t allow free access to its archive (just as the NYTimes doesn’t either) and charges for current stories, it is removing itself from ‘the conversation’, from the debate and the written thought processes that go around the world in the minds of everyone who does research for a topic online, let alone bloggers.

I googled “Enron” — an issue the Journal covered exhaustively, and which two of its reporters even wrote a book about — and not one article appeared within the first 25 pages (250 results.) Then I rigged the test by plugging in “Wall Street Journal” and “Enron” and still struck out (although I did pull up a couple of Journal stories specially edited for high school classes.) If you can input the name of your publication into a search engine and not come up with any stories, you must be digitally tone-deaf.

As the searches on Google return New York Times pages directing you to buy an article for $3, the Journal goes one step further and returns no results at all. By not having a presence on the web, they are alienating themselves and cutting off a new generation of readers. Though they may be widely viewed as authoritative and knowledgeable, but if they aren’t attracting new readers through the use of the web, they’ll find their subscription model will fade into insignificance. It doesn’t matter if you can charge eighty bucks a year for your service if fewer and fewer people read it every year, and more importantly, no-one cares?

The London Times has tried to charge for access which has resulted in The Guardian becoming the most quoted British newspaper on the web - their presence online is notable only in their Business coverage whilst the Guardian’s copy regularly appears on metafilters such as Google News. With open access to archives the papers encourage users to return to the site, thereby increasing the accuracy of their advertising, and so increasing the profitability of the free-content model. By charging, papers around the world are missing the point. Even tabloids are now hosting large scale online presences - witnessed by the NY Post and the UK’s tabloids like The Sun and the Daily Mail; if they can get the web to talk about them then they will appear to be part of the story and so draw in readers, but with no online strategy the WSJ is losing out on any mention, any prominence and any profile. Soon they’ll see this hurt the bottom line and then, they’ll change but whether that’s too little too late is to be seen.