Ten years ago when I came to China, South China Morning Post was fairly well known in Beijing. Though it could not be purchased in many places, it was widely read by expats living there and I'm sure elsewhere in China. And then when Web news took off between 1998 and 2001, SCMP.com was also a hot ticket, as there were yet few other means by which to get English-language news.

I did have an SCMP.com subscription for a short period around 2000 or 2001, but it was cumbersome to use and to store news stories. Also, it was getting ever-easier to find alternative English-language news websites about China (and I helped start and manage one in 1998 called Sinopolis). Finally, so many expats in the early part of the millennium were using friends' corporate account usernames for SCMP, making it even less worthwhile to buy a subscription to read the very rare singularly SCMP story. Why buy a magazine of naked ladies when I could lounge all day for free on a nude beach?

SCMP.com is now even less well-known on the mainland. For expats arriving in Shanghai or Beijing in the last few years, unless they first did time in Hong Kong, very few can probably attest to reading or knowing about SCMP print or online. It's become a "has been" primarily because of its inability to rely on strictly advertising and to open up its flood gates to free readership and syndication. Like Fons at ChinaHerald, I too received an invite from the hardworking publisher at SCMP this week, but it's really not worthwhile to even try to login and test things out. Again, so many other sources of free news nowadays.

So this comes back to the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, because they too made some of the same online faux pas. Around 2001, one of WSJ.com's top marketing guys from the USA came to give a presentation in Beijing. At the time, if I remember it correctly, WSJ was commanding the highest CPM rates in the B2B news sector anywhere in the world, and that might have also gone for any other website outside of the business news sphere. The at-the-time marketing guru was swooning about the ability to charge such extravagant advertising placement prices because WSJ readership was so exclusive, rich, and malleable. This was fairly accurate.

However, over the years carpetbagging financial news outfits like Yahoo Finance and Marketwatch came onto the scene and started poaching WSJ's users. Since 2000, I've read maybe one WSJ article each year that was passed to me by a friend who read something there, but I read at least five Marketwatch and/or Yahoo Finance pieces each day. The latter are generally free, and financial numbers are financial numbers — I don't need the vicarious commentary. I have stayed away from the Wall Street Journal so much that it was not even until earlier this year that I knew about Walt Mossberg (sacrilegious, I know). Sure, I had heard his name, but it was not until this year that I actually started reading his stuff — and that was only because of a marketing push for his blog containing free information. I like his stuff, but he covers very American-centric tech items that are not often applicable to China. Working in China for so long, there was nothing that I missed by not being a Wall Street Journal subscriber.

Wall Street Journal was very slow to get in the Internet groove. True, they had a great looking website and hired some very talented people, but the institution of WSJ was old and cranky. Over the years in China, I approached Dow Jones a few times with items and while I have great respective for the folks always running their business units, their corporate focus was off. Dow Jones, for example, was a signatory to the implementation of NewsML, which allows for syndicated XML feeds. Their China chief tech guy was not aware of what NewsML meant, but had they been focused on some of these things, they could have grabbed onto Topix.net (bought by NY Times) or other aggregating services or even made more money by investing in some Chinese content ventures. These are pure ad revenue models that they missed, and Dow Jones could have excelled.

It's unfair to point to one incident and generalize about their entire global operations, but there were other indicators in China and abroad that the company didn't "get it". One of their smartest moves was the purchase a couple years ago of Marketwatch, their competitor. By purchasing that powerhouse, they finally admitted that the free news model worked very well.

Rupert Murdoch does not have a great record when it comes to putting facts before finance. But he does have the ability to work quickly and to change with the Times [sic]. Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal reporters might not like the idea of bowing to Mr. Murdoch, but the man, his family, and his company are focused on delivering what the public wants. Over the last few years, Dow Jones has had the money and the ability to change, and if their present family of owners aren't lively enough to deliver results, it is time for new managers to take over. Writing news is all about hitting the masses, and Murdoch will ensure things even reach the lowest common denominator.

And since when has the Wall Street Journal been such a venerable place? True, they are staffed with noble, ethical, principled journalists, but the few editorials I've read over the years smack of delusional elitism that shows the editorial board is in tune with Murdoch's flair.