SAN FRANCISCO ? During a presentation at ad:tech, a Wall Street Journal executive said that the publication?s monetization strategy relies on a marriage of subscriptions for premium digital content and advertising.

Traditional print publications have been hit hard by the recession and have turned increasingly to digital content for revenue streams to buoy their print products. The Wall Street Journal responded by charging for access to WSJ.com and launching paid applications for Research In Motion?s BlackBerry and Apple?s iPhone and iPad, all of which also include ads.

?The Wall Street Journal Digital Network?s strategy is balancing editorial integrity and ad integration,? said Brian Quinn, vice president and general manager of digital ad sales at The Wall Street Journal, New York. ?We have to balance the needs of the audience and the needs of our advertisers.

?We offer a suite of digital products, and mobile is becoming a much, much bigger part of the mix,? he said. ?We?re playing on every platform that?s out there, including mobile and the iPad.

?A big challenge is dealing with the separation of church and state, advertiser desire versus audience demand.?

The Wall Street Journal is an English-language international daily newspaper published by Dow Jones & Co., a division of News Corp., with Asian and European editions. It has the largest circulation of any newspaper in the United States.

Digital strategy features mobile
The first mobile platform from Dow Jones & Co. was the Dow Jones Sales Triggers application for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch, which gives mobile professionals access to up-to-the-minute intelligence about business changes such as management moves, mergers and new investments (see story).

Next, the Wall Street Journal launched a branded mobile application powered by FreeRange Communications Inc. that automatically downloads optimized content to consumers' BlackBerry devices (see story).

Around that time, the debate on paid content versus free really began to heat up with announcements from news organizations such as CNN and The Wall Street Journal that they will start charging access to their news content via mobile devices. 

The Wall Street Journal began offering a mobile-only subscription that cost $2 per week while a mobile subscription combined with either a print Journal or WSJ.com subscription was priced at an additional $1 weekly (see story).

The WSJ.com Mobile Reader?a mobile application that delivers content from WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com, Barrons.com and AllThingsD.com to most BlackBerry smartphones?was first available only in Europe and Asia (see story).

The application has since been expanded to Apple?s iPhone and is now available in North America as well.

At press time, WSJ.com was offering a limited-time 25 percent discount letting BlackBerry or iPhone users subscribe to the WSJ Mobile Reader for $1.50 per week plus four weeks free?56 weeks for a total of $78.

The Wall Street Journal has also jumped on the iPad bandwagon early.

A subscription to The Wall Street Journal for iPad costs $3.99 per week.

The iPad platform features subscriber-only content in sections such as Business, Markets and Opinion.

Subscribers can access a seven-day archive of articles downloaded for reading anytime, even when the iPad is not connected to the Internet.

Readers can save sections and articles for later reading, as well as personalize My Journal to save and share articles across WSJ.com and mobile.

Mobile advertising
While the Wall Street Journal relies heavily on subscriptions for both its print edition and digital content, advertising is an important part of the mix as well.

However, the company sells all of its own online and mobile inventory?it does not work with ad networks.

?Our goal not to fill our entire inventory, it?s about meeting or surpassing our revenue goals,? Mr. Quinn said. ?Thirty million people come to our content each month, and they come for the content our journalists produce.

?So many publishers have created microsites for advertisers, and the success of the media campaign is judged by how many users got to the damn landing page, even though that?s only one part of it,? he said. ?We believe in respecting the user while having big, high-impact ads.

?One of the rules we have is ads cannot cover editorial content, but we do offer premium positioning for advertisers on a large canvas with minimal disruption.?