Murdoch outlines charges coming for iPhone, BlackBerry users.

Rupert Murdoch has told a Goldman Sachs conference that charges will be introduced for those who access the Wall Street Journal’s website via a mobile phone.

The Wall Street Journal owner said the charges would be $1 a week for those with an existing subscription, and $2 a week without.

The charges will be introduced “within a few months” said Mr Murdoch, and are likely to be led by the paper’s iPhone and BlackBerry apps - reading software that makes it easier to access Journal content from an Apple or RIM handset.

The media impresario has hit headlines recently by announcing he plans to introduce paid content - likely through micropayments - for multiple mainstream newspapers in his empire. The broad time frame is mid 2010.

The Wall Street Journal currently has around 2 million print subscribers, and 1 million paid subscribers to its website (of a total of around 20 million unique visitors a month; not all of the paper’s content is paywalled).

Around 300,000 people have downloaded The Wall Street Journal’s iPhone app. If they - plus an unknown number of BlackBerry app users - take to the new mobile content model, Mr Murdoch has the potential to boost the paper's paid subs by a third.