Why do people pay for the Wall Street Journal online?

Alan Mutter has started a two-part series on the Wall Street Journal, the world's best-known paywalled news site. He intends to show why the pay model is right, and in part one he has enlisted the help of guest blogger Bill Grueskin, former managing editor of WSJ.com.

In the article, Grueskin tells us about all the naysayers who told the Journal's management that a paywalled site was the wrong way to go, and he addresses some of the more common misconceptions about the Journal's system.

The pull quote comes at the end, when Grueskin recounts the answer a colleague of his -- Peter Kann, former CEO of Dow Jones and the guy responsible for the WSJ.com paywall -- gave to a Columbia Journalism School student's question about why the Journal started as a pay site.

"I made the site paid because I was ignorant," Kann told the class. "I didn't know any better. I just thought people should pay for content."

Part two of Mutter's series should be coming any day now.

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