Mr. Murdoch, Take Down This Wall!

Well, it's not the '80s, Reagan's gone along with out-sized newspaper profits, and we don't hear that particular wall-busting clamor from the masses.

But it's clear Rupert will have his way with his new prize, the Wall Street Journal. These things drag on for months, but now semi-officially, the deed is done. More than 50% of the votes approving the sale of Dow Jones (DJ) to News Corp (NWS) are in, according to the Journal yesterday.

The pay wall separating the Journal from the global reaches of the free web should be perforated soon. Just last week, both CEO Rich Zannino and news consumer head Gordon Crovitz got out of the way, helping clear the path for the guys with the digital picks and sledgehammers. (There will be two to three dozen more to go, according to Richard Perez-Pena's good overall take on the WSJ turnover.) Taking down the wall will be one more major step in declaring the ascendancy of advertising over "paid circulation," with that term now sounding almost quaint. News content on the web apparently doesn't want to be free -- it pines to be, who'd a thunk it, "ad-monetized." The whole connection of readers to news content, long made through quarters and monthly payments, is about to be broken, with advertisers paying nearly the whole freight for the journalism business.

News of all kind, online and print, is going free.

Just this week, Reuters (RTRSY) -- long a stickler in receiving license fee payments for its content -- announced a ad revenue share deal with the New York Times' (NYT) International Herald Tribune, and AP's been doing lots more rev share deals, too. Last month's Audit Bureau of Circulation decision saying "paid" really means whatever a publisher wants it to mean further means that paid print circulation as a model is further weakening.

The Ocean of Free is not one news publishers are eagerly diving into, but the big, hairy guys, the new mainstream mass media of our age -- Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), MSN (MSFT), AOL (TWX) -- are making them jump, before they get pushed. Now they'll test just how much in ad dollars they wring out of the newer media and freer print distribution.

No doubt, like the the NY Times foray into paid with Times Select (the experiment it ended this fall), the WSJ.com pay wall has retarded online reader attraction and retention. Techcrunch just reported that the Times' traffic boost has been huge -- 64% up in unique visitors to 19.4 million and 52% up in page views to 181 million. The Journal's own bump should be even more impressive, since it would be going from a walled site to a free one, while the Times just dropped its hybrid model.

The revenue question for the Journal is all about climbing a couple of hills. The first is easiest to see: making up close to $75 million in online subscription revenue. That could take more than two years. The second is tougher to get visibility on: how much will a free WSJ.com lead paying print subscribers to drop that sub. If that happens, then a significant support of the business overall -- circulation makes up 21.7% of the Dow Jones' Consumer division revenue -- will erode as well. That's been the concern of some of the Dow Jones naysayers.

Certainly, the continuing erosion of print subscribers -- around 2.5-3% annually now for three years -- is do in part to newspaper content being available free online. For the Wall Street Journal, making its site free will inevitably have a pinball effect on overall circulation revenue and overall profits. So in the short run, the Journal will take a hit, the only question is how a big one. And in the long run, well in the long run, we'll all be Kindled, spindled and digitized beyond belief.

More Content Bridges on the Dow Jones takeover, here