The Wall Street Journal Online on Tuesday introduced a major redesign, featuring a new layout, better navigation and expanded content.
It’s the first upgrade to WSJ.com in six years. The change comes nearly a year after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. officially acquired Dow Jones & Co,. which publishes the Journal, for $5.6 billion.
The change is “part of the new ownership,” said Gordon McLeod, President of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, adding that the redesign “will help us maximize both subscribers and the broader audience.”
Gordon McLeod
WSJ.com is one of the last vestiges of paid content on the Web. As of July, the Web site had 1,037,000 subscribers, a 23% increase compared with July 2006, according to Dow Jones. It had more than 17 million visitors in August, a 62% increase compared with the same time in 2007, and more than 150 million page views in August, a 15% jump from the year-earlier period.
Indeed, several of the changes in the redesign cater to WSJ.com subscribers, including Journal Community, a Web 2.0 tool; a new Management section and expanded What’s News and Heard on the Street sections. Those elements of WSJ.com available only to subscribers are marked with a “key” icon while non-subscribers will be able to access a preview of the content. The site also features prominent links to other Dow Jones assets including MarketWatch, All Things Digital and Barron’s.
Non-subscribers have access to several content areas, such as general news, sports, travel, fashion, personal finance and food and drink. Blogs, videos, podcasts and photos are also fair game for non-subscribers. Ramping up these areas of coverage — and providing free access to non-subscribers — gives the Journal an opportunity to penetrate advertising markets beyond the Journal’s traditional ad precincts of business and finance.
With the various changes, “We can more fully serve people interested in sports and travel [for example], but with a Journal twist on stories, and appeal to different types of advertisers we traditionally didn’t get,” McLeod said, adding that as part of the redesign WSJ.com has bigger ad units and has jettisoned ads that run over content in any way. Ad rates will stay the same, McLeod said.
Other highlights of the redesign include a new video player, expanded coverage of small business, politics and world news and the introduction of the “Newsreel,” a visual and text-driven tool atop all story pages highlighting the most salient stories in each major section of the site with direct navigation.
What’s more, the changes will allow WSJ.com to make changes on the fly, no small thing in a world that places an increasingly high premium on speed.
“It will enable us to act and react more quickly and take advantage of our content and technology quicker than we have before,” McLeod added. “It’s no longer going to take us a day to change a font.”
The redesign of WSJ.com is the latest in a bevy of changes at the Journal designed to build out the brand.
Premiere issue of WSJ.
Late last week the Journal rolled out WSJwine, which offers access to quality wines through a direct-to-home service. The Journal recently introduced a WSJ.com Mobile Reader for BlackBerry users and on Sept. 6 debuted WSJ., a glossy lifestyle magazine.
The magazine, which targets luxe markets and runs in the U.S. Weekend Edition of the Journal, has a circulation of 800,000 in the U.S. and 160,000 outside the U.S. It’s starting off as a quarterly before moving to a monthly frequency in June. The magazine launched with 51 advertisers, 19 of which are new to the Journal franchise.
The podcast below is from a recent conversation I had with WSJ. Editor in Chief Tina Gaudoin about how the magazine fits within the Journal brand and how it will distinguish itself compared with other publications targeting the Jet set.
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