September 15, 2008, 12:00 am
New WSJ.com Builds on Its Community of Subscribers
By Vindu Goel
The venerable Wall Street Journal will activate a revamped version of its Web site, WSJ.com, early Tuesday morning.
The new site isn’t a lot different from the old one, based on screenshots and other details Journal executives shared with me last week. It has a cleaner, more inviting look, thanks to fewer ads and the elimination of the navigation buttons on the left side of the home page. Unchanged is the most important aspect of the current site: the wall that blocks non-subscribers from reading most of The Journal’s business news articles.
wsj.comThe new WSJ.com sports new community features.
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However, one aspect of the redesign is radical, and if it’s successful, it could provide lessons for other news organizations trying to build deeper connections with their readers: New community features will allow WSJ.com’s million or so paid online subscribers to comment on every story, pose their own discussion questions, e-mail each other and set up profiles that will allow others to see what they’re doing on the site.
In other words, WSJ.com will offer a social network for business professionals, built around the content of the newspaper and Web site but not limited to it. It’s what the Journal’s advertising side likes to call “a clean, well-lit place” where its readers can talk with like-minded souls about everything from the Lehman meltdown to the best business-class hotels in Shanghai.
“You can network with people who won’t shout profanities at you,” said Alan Murray, executive editor for online news at the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corporation. “We think it’s going to be very powerful.”
The dream of building a vibrant online community of business readers isn’t unique. Fast Company magazine overhauled its Web site in February to focus on reader conversation, only to find that the readers weren’t all that interested in talking. BusinessWeek is trying something similar built around topic pages. And LinkedIn, a social network focused on the workplace, is attempting to build communities around people within specific companies or industries. (LinkedIn has partnered with NYTimes.com on some community features).
Like LinkedIn, participants in WSJ.com’s community must use their real identities. The site will enforce that requirement by initially limiting the community features to paid subscribers of WSJ.com, although Mr. Murray said the company might eventually allow non-subscribers to join as long as their identities could be verified by other means, such as a credit card.
In the company’s view, keeping it real will encourage better conversation and eliminate the need for moderators to screen comments before publishing them. For example, a small-business owner who posts a tax question on the site can figure out whether the people responding are accountants, I.R.S. agents, small-business owners or just interested fellow readers.
Contrast that with most other sites, including The Wall Street Journal’s own blogs, which are open to comment by the anonymous masses and can sometimes degenerate into raucous, even nasty exchanges.
If the concept works, WSJ.com could find itself as a hub for all kinds of business conversation, boosting reader loyalty and those oh-so-important page views for advertisers. The opportunity to network with those other Journal readers might even attract new paid subscribers.
Mr. Murray said the site is also working with MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn to find ways to create a common profile so that readers can leverage their existing network connections. “We’d like to get to the point where your profile is completely portable,” he said.
The risk is that WSJ.com’s online club ends up being so exclusive and proper that it will bore readers rather than lure them in.
After all, the wild-and-woolly nature of the Internet is part of what makes it interesting. A recent WSJ.com blog post about Sen. Barack Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” utterance drew more than 1,000 comments. They ranged from “Obama may be right, but I’m still the hottest pig on Earth!” (posted by Miss Piggy) to “Write in the true pit bull, Hillary ‘08″ (posted by New York, New York).
Would the conversation have been as lively — or occurred at all — if everyone knew their bosses, customers and colleagues were watching?
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