《华尔街日报》将对手机读者收费

The Wall Street Journal soon will begin charging people to read the paper on mobile devices such as their BlackBerrys, the paper's owner Rupert Murdoch said on Tuesday.

The move, which News Corp CEO Murdoch announced at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York, is an attempt to find a new way for the business daily to make more money from an increasingly popular way for people to access their news.

The Journal will start charging for mobile access "in one to two months," Murdoch said.

Under the plan, people who do not subscribe to the Journal would pay $2 a week for mobile access, and subscribers would pay $1 per week. Subscribers to both the print and online version of the paper will get mobile for free.

Charging for mobile access is one of the boldest ways yet that a U.S. newspaper has tried to increase revenue, at a time when falling circulation and print advertising revenue is threatening the survival of many newspapers.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few US newspapers that has successfully charged for access to news on the Internet.

This year, many U.S. newspaper publishers have been debating different ways to get people to pay for news online. It is unclear if any of them will work.

At the Goldman Sachs event, Murdoch said the environment for advertising is "very much better" than three or four months ago -- a view echoed by a number of other industry executives.

He added that the company was mulling options such as subscriptions and pay-per-view for Hulu, the popular online video destination founded by News Corp and NBC Universal, which is majority owned by General Electric.

《华尔街日报》的所有者鲁伯特．默多克于本周二称，该报不久将开始对通过黑莓等手机终端阅读报纸的读者进行收费。

越来越多的读者通过手机获取新闻，这份商业日报试图借此开发新的盈利模式。美国新闻集团首席执行官默多克在高盛公司于纽约召开的一次会议上宣布了这一决定。

据默多克介绍，《华尔街日报》将在‘一到两个月内’开始对手机读者群收费。

按照该计划，没有订阅《华尔街日报》的手机读者需支付每周2美元的阅读费用，报纸订户为每周1美元，同时订阅印刷版和网络版的读者则可免费进行手机阅读。

手机付费阅读是美国报纸至今所尝试的最大胆的增收方式之一。尤其是在眼下这样的时期，不断下滑的报纸发行量和印刷广告收入正威胁着很多报纸的生存。

《华尔街日报》是美国少数几家成功实现网络新闻付费的报纸之一。

今年，美国多家报纸出版商一直在争论让读者付费阅读网上新闻的各种方式。目前尚不清楚其中是否将有可行的方式。

默多克在高盛公司的会议上称，目前的广告环境比三、四个月前“好了很多”，其他的一些行业高管也持同样看法。

他说，公司正考虑以订阅或按点击付费等方式对人气视频网站Hulu进行收费。Hulu是由新闻集团和通用电器旗下的NBC环球共同创建的。

Vocabulary:

mull：to think about carefully; consider（仔细考虑，深思）

pay-per-view：a system requiring that a subscriber pay for each program viewed（按次计费）