This is going to be big. The Wall Street Journal, one of the world's most famous newspapers, unleashes its long-awaited onslaught on European markets today with a redesign of its European edition, hefty investment to back expansion plans, and much improved coverage of the e-economy.
Backed by $60m (£36m) of investment and more staff, the European strategy is also designed to boost subscription numbers to the Journal's online edition and marks a huge escalation in the battle for eyeballs on business news websites.
Frederick Kempe, editor and associate publisher of the Wall Street Journal Europe, says the move coincides with a change in European attitudes to business - as the euro begins to knit European business closer together and ordinary families begin to buy into share ownership.
This enthusiasm for buying shares, Kempe says, is being fanned by the creation of a new economy. Technology is driving change into the way people work, invest and live. The Journal has covered technology more comprehensively than most papers for some time. With its reach into the west coast of America one way, and its strength in Asia the other, Kempe hopes that his new European edition will give readers a far better service than is available from, say, the Financial Times.
If this sounds familiar, it should. The FT, owned by the media group Pearson, recently unveiled a joint venture with CBS.MarketWatch.com to set up a European business news service aimed at the private investor.
But there is a huge difference between the Journal and the services offered by the Financial Times and its affiliates. Pearson is wedded to the concept of giving its online news content to users free, making money from advertising and e-commerce.
The Journal is taking precisely the opposite line. Peter Kann, chairman and chief executive of Dow Jones which publishes the WSJ, says he is committed to the paid model, where users subscribe to the online service. This, he argues, protects the printed paper from being devalued by association with a give-away service, and will be better for advertisers too.
In Europe on a flying visit to launch the redesign, Kann admits that neither he nor any newspaper publisher can know what the internet will do to their businesses in the long run. But he seems unflustered by the prospect of steering one of the world's most eminent papers on to the web.
Formerly a staff reporter who worked in the Pittsburgh and Los Angeles news bureaux, Kann was the paper's first resident reporter in Vietnam and, from 1969 to 1975, covered Asian affairs. It was another war, though, that brought him into the limelight. In 1972 he won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the conflict between India and Pakistan.
Kann is keen to protect the value of the WSJ brand by charging a hefty amount for the paper too. The cover price of the European edition will be cut from today to £1 from £1.25 as part of the plan to put the squeeze on the FT (price 85p).
Kann's philosophy appears to fly in the face of conventional wisdom about how to succeed on the web, where users are accustomed to free services. In reality the marketing strategy makes more sense once the wealth of the European Journal's readership is known: 80% of the paper's readers are European nationals with an average household income of more than $330,000 (£205,000).
Kann is aware that most US newspapers have made a hash of switching their content to the online world. Dow Jones has decided that it must try to leverage its different operations so that each reinforces, rather than detracts from, the other. This is not a new approach in the communications industry, where technology is forcing companies to operate in several media at once. At the Journal, the most obvious sign of this approach is in the redesigned European edition, where a navigation bar across the first page is a clear indication of its integration with wsj.com.
Dow Jones will also be using its wire services to update wsj.com. Bylined pieces from the wires are already used in the paper. The aim is to take the wire feeds and re-edit them for a wider audience via the website. In this way wsj.com should emerge as a strong blend of analysis and moving news.
Dow Jones executives argue that the wires may prove to be their best weapon in the battle ahead: no other rival internet-based service could justify the cost of 800 staff to provide dynamic news, but Dow Jones has this number on its wires already. The printed Journal, by contrast, has 600.
Kann is also explicitly linking the online and paper editions by giving European subscribers to the printed Journal a free subscription to the online version for the rest of this year.
"The two can coexist and complement each other, performing different functions," he says. He also stresses that different people subscribe to the online version. Two-thirds of wsj.com's 375,000 subscribers do not take the printed paper (paid global circulation, 2.3m). Kann says wsj.com growth will come from both online-only subscribers and people taking it as a package with the paper.
That people should want both may seem strange, given the surfeit of information already flying around. But it may be evidence that the Journal is managing to strike a balance between its different services.
Kann says people turn to the paper for analysis and to the online edition for up-to-date breaking news. But he stresses that the common denominator is quality of information. And that in turn leads him to a defence of traditional media as much more reliable in the main than fledgling internet start-ups. "In defence of traditional media, it has standards and generally doesn't want to sacrifice these across different media and that is right."
Kann faces some tough challenges ahead, not least in the management of his people. He has yet to make up his mind on how to incentivise the staff and ensure that they are not poached wholesale by rivals, but points out that the company already offers bonuses to some.
He has also to decide how far integration of the wires, online edition and printed paper should go. For the moment, not that far seems to be the view. He says the editors of the different editions work alongside one another while remaining focused on their respective charges. He dismisses out of hand the concept of a centralised editing team to act as a clearing house for material - "just another level of bureaucracy" - and is happy for now with this looser arrangement.
Kann acknowledges that the Journal is not a typical publication. The average household income of its readers is high, and its content based mostly on one slice of life. But other newspaper publishers will be watching the Dow Jones strategy closely, and not just in Europe. For if Kann succeeds, he may shatter forever the notion that the internet has to be based on free delivery. Publishers, if not readers, will be grateful.
