The Wall Street Journal’s is planning for pay-by-the article browsing as a an alternative for those who don't want ot pay its $US103 annual subscription to its website.

The move builds on last week's comment by Rupert Murdoch that all News Corp-owned papers will charge for online content within a year, indicating micropayments could be the model for bringing paid content to the masses, too.

In an interview yesterday with The Financial Times, Dow Jones editor-in-chief Robert Thomson said the micropayment system will be introduced this northern autumn.

Mr Thomson would not say what the journal would pay per article, only that it would be “rightfully high”.

He later told Reuters: “Once we have your details, we will be able to charge you according to what you read; in particular, a high price for specialist material."

In the past, newspaper websites have previously tried to charge for back-content, or - like the NZ Herald and The New York Times - made ill-fated attempts to wall-off columnists.

But The Wall Street Journal’s micropayment system will mark the first time a mass circulation paper has attempted a pay-by-the-article model for news stories.

Such micropayments - which some proponents see running to as little as one or two cents an article - could become the vehicle for charging for all News Corp online content, from The Sun and The New York Post to The Sunday Times.

Last week, Mr Murdoch said on a News Corp conference call that the group’s newspapers would charge for online content within a year.

"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," Murdoch told journalists on the call.

Certainly, News Corp. is among the many malfunctioning media empires, with poor newspaper performance contributing to its 47% profit dip to $US755 million in its quarterly profit announced last week.

iPhone good, Kindle bad
Mr Murdoch also revealed that more than 360,000 people had downloaded the Wall Street Journal’s iPhone app.

The News Corp boss was down on Amazon Kindle, however, despite around 15,000 of the Journal’s two million subscribers choosing to pay $US9.99 a month for the paper’s Kindle edition.

Mr Murdoch said he preferred not to hand over control of his copyrighted material to Amazon, and that News Corp. would be working on its own e-reader.