Alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, doesn’t believe the canard that only financial news outlets can charge for content on the Internet. He concedes that the Journal has a built-in advantage — its audience reads the newspaper for business and profit — but in an interview this weekend, Murray told me, “The truth of the matter is there are tons of people out there paying large amounts of money, billions of dollars, to buy information every day.”

Check out the the first set of highlights from our conversation in the video above. (There’ll be a few more.) I’ve also sussed out five pieces of advice that Murray had for news organizations considering some sort of pay wall:

1. The best model is a mix of paid and free content. “It’s not pay wall/no pay wall,” Murray told me. The Journal allows free access to all of its political, arts, and opinion coverage, in addition to certain breaking news stories and all of its blogs. But the rest of the site requires a subscription.

2. You can’t charge for exclusives that will just be repeated elsewhere. This was my favorite lesson from Murray, who explained, “If it’s a big news story, if we report a takeover and — we could hold that behind the pay wall, but if we do, BusinessWeek or someone else will simply write a story saying ‘The Wall Street Journal is reporting x,’ and they’ll get all the traffic. Why would we do that?” So they drop the pay wall, “and take the traffic ourselves, thank you very much,” Murray said.

3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site. “That’s the been the mistake that some people have made in the past,” Murray said. Items with broad appeal are better used to build traffic that can be turned into advertising revenue.

4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches. It may be easier to identify those opportunities with financial news, but Murray suggested, for instance, that a local newspaper could consider charging for coverage of high school sports. “To the people who want to read it,” he said, “they really want to read it because maybe their kids are involved. Maybe they’re willing to pay for that or maybe there’s a photography service that’s connected to that where you can download pictures of your kids or of the game. But only if you’re a subscriber.”

5. The narrower the niche, perhaps the better. This was the bit of news in our interview: The Journal is planning what Murray called a “premium initiative” to sell “narrower information services” at a higher subscription rate to subsets of its readership. He was coy about what services will be offered but mentioned, as examples, energy coverage and some sort of news service for chief financial officers. (According to someone else I know at the Journal, those are, in fact, likely to be among the first offerings of this tiered-premium service.)

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The clearest indication of Rupert Murdoch’s influence over The Wall Street Journal might be pirates on the front page. Yesterday’s lead story reported the dramatic tale of hijacking and hostages on the high seas of East Africa. “U.S. Cargo Ship Repels Pirates” was the headline. (The cover of Murdoch’s New York Post was less restrained: “YO HO D’OH!” over a shot of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.)

Two years ago, before News Corp.’s purchase of the Journal, pirates might not have appeared in the newspaper at all, let alone across four columns at the top of A1. Not that they don’t belong — after all, there’s a business angle to maritime piracy — but what a shift from the days when the Journal’s front page proudly ignored yesterday’s goings-on in favor of sprawling features and analytical takes.

In the video above, deputy managing editor Alan Murray recalls how the Journal didn’t report on the Lorena Bobbitt saga for a month and a half in 1993 before breaking its silence with a long profile of the urologist who reattached John Bobbitt’s penis. That was the one and only mention of the Bobbitts in the Journal that year while the rest of the media seemingly covered nothing else.

The newsification of the Journal’s front page has been widely discussed, sometimes praised, and often lamented, but I’ve never heard anyone explain the metamorphosis in the way that Murray did in our interview:

What Rupert Murdoch has done is come in and say, look, you’re missing a big opportunity….These papers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia are very weak. We should be going in there and saying to people, you don’t need this paper. We can give you everything that you need in The Wall Street Journal. And, in fact, that’s what we’re doing now, and that’s one reason why — our circulation isn’t skyrocketing, but it is inching up at a time when everybody else in plummeting.

That makes a lot of sense, but I also wonder about the long-term strategy. Offering more general-interest news may work to knock off some local newspapers, but what happens then? By shifting from unique content to widely replicable stories, is the Journal slowly relinquishing its competitive advantage in a news business that privileges singularity? I don’t know, but I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of others in the comments.

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Last week we published two videos from my interview with Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, covering his wisdom on charging for content and his thoughts on changes at the Journal under Rupert Murdoch.

In this third installment, Murray, who oversees the Journal’s website, talks about what qualities he looks for in hiring online reporters and how he manages journalists with different skillsets. Here’s the money quote:

My generation, the notion of marketing your own copy, that was like dirty. You know, don’t make me get near that. That’s somebody else’s job. But in fact, now, marketing — we don’t call it that, but that’s a big part of what online journalists do. Figuring out which blogs they need to be in touch with in order to keep their audience together, using Twitter to drive traffic to your stuff, figuring out the right mix.

Murray himself is active on Twitter under the username @alansmurray, where he offers a mix of financial news and inside-the-newsroom tidbits. (A tweet yesterday: “Slow news day….so far.”) I’ve been feeling more confident about the economy recently as Murray points to signs that the markets may have reached bottom.

A full transcript of the above video is after the jump. Keep reading »