After saying publicly that he planned to make The Wall Street Journal's website free and rely on advertising revenue to make up for lost subscriptions, Rupert Murdoch has changed his mind.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Murdoch said that the articles and sections "giving the greatest insights, that will still be a subscription service."

I guess we can assume that the paper's editorial page will be free now. Perhaps we will even be paid to read it.

News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) appears to have gone back and forth on this matter, and I doubt we've heard the last of it. Long-term, I still think that the WSJ website will end up being free. The increasing quality of online business coverage will make a WSJ subscription less of a necessity for many readers. But a free WSJ-website would instantly become the top business news site in America.

As I've already covered on BloggingStocks, the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) has been considering getting rid of its premium online service, New York TimesSelect, for several weeks. According to an article in today's New York Post, the TimesSelect content has finally been "freed." The article goes on to state that the service will be discontinued once "software issues associated with making the switch to a free service" is resolved.

TimesSelect was a paid service that allowed readers to access the works of the most prominent and widely-followed New York Times columnists. Pricing for this product was less than $50 per year, but in today's blogging age the internet is loaded with free media and very few people were interested in paying up for newspaper content. As a result, the service's subscriber count fell to about 221,000 in June, down from 224,000 in April.

This move makes perfect sense. The age of paying for content on the internet is slowly losing its appeal to both publishers and readers. Publishers can reach a much wider audience and oftentimes monetize users at nearly the same rates with today's advertising solutions while readers are happy to receive the free information.