Wall Street Journal iPhone App Content is Free

Wired – The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers that charges for content online, released an app for the iPhone Wednesday which sets their content free, poking another hole in one of the internet’s oldest pay walls.
The Journal released an free app for the Blackberry last August, a seemingly more natural fit with a corporate demographic. But for business news junkies the iPhone app is a watershed event, putting a financial newspaper of record on what remains essentially a consumer device for free. Even on Amazon’s Kindle the Journal is $9.99 a month — about as much as subscribing to the newspaper itself.
There are plenty of brand-name news app on the iPhone — including Bloomberg, the New York Times, CNN and the AP — so the Journal is a little late to the game. But none of the other big players charge online and, to read most anything on wsj.com, you have to pony up $103 a year — $140 if you want the dead tree version, too.
The Journal has always charged for its digital content, as does its global competitor, the Financial Times. Sure, there is a way to get at Journal content for free. But that method requires knowing what your looking for, making it useless for discovery, which is the essence of reading the news.
By going mobile, and having advertisers instead of readers pay, the Journal stands to broaden its audience without necessarily jeopardizing the subscription model of the wsj.com. News Corp. CEP Rupert Murdoch flirted with the idea of dropping the online paywall while he was in the midst of acquiring Dow Jones, owner of the Journal, but seems to have dropped the idea, and apparently feels no threat by having the content available at no cost on smartphones.