NYTimes.com"I found some things to quarrel with in
his essay," writes Times executive editor
Bill Keller. "He's a little credulous about The Wall Street Journal's online subscription model, which he seems to see as a stroke of modern business acumen. I suspect
Rupert Murdoch's decision not to make the Web site free when he bought The Journal had a lot to do with another reality: The Journal's online subscriptions are bundled with print subscriptions, and freeing his online content would have hurt his print circulation, and thus potentially his print advertising revenue. ...
Walter [Issacson] doesn't really grapple with the main puzzle of a pay model: how to keep it from stifling traffic, especially search-driven traffic, so much that online advertisers go away. I'm not saying that problem is insoluble. Just that, as far as I know, no one has solved it yet."
