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"The Wall Street Journal rolled out their long awaited new look over the weekend, and I actually had a chance to take a look at it yesterday due to all the AIG/Lehman brothers mess as I tried to get a handle on how many stomach ulcers I should develop this week. What's interesting, aside from the design itself, is that they've implemented community and social networking features that are almost completely unique to the Web we all know and love; the WSJ socnet is (like much of the featured content) behind a paywall.\nPaidContent called the new look \"dark and brooding,\" but I think it's just the newspaper being overly emo and dramatic amidst some particularly depressing economic news-cycles.\n\nFellow Mashable writer Leslie Poston wrote about this earlier yesterday over at Tech.Blorge that the Journal may have completely missed the boat putting their social network behind a paywall. \u00A0I'm not sure I'm in complete agreement:\n\nThe Wall Street Journal decides to launch its own social network. Unfortunately, this is one of many attempts at entering the social media for enterprise space that screams \u201CYou\u2019re doing it wrong\u201D.\nHow is the\u00A0Wall Street Journal\u00A0missing the boat with their attempt at community building? For starters, they have made their community an exclusive, behind-close-doors paid subscription service. By trying to be another FaceBook or LinkedIn for paid subscribers and excluding casual visitors and readers, the Wall Street Journal effectively eliminates the most important aspect of social media for enterprise - community building.\n\nWhile I've never been a fan of the pay-wall in general, there have been a number of situations where I think it's a very viable business model. PEHub, for one, offers some of very advanced information that's available by paid subscription only. The information contained therein is generally only useful for a very short and finite period of time, and the folks it ends up being useful for usually have the money to pay for it.\nSimilarly, the Wall Street Journal came from those types of roots. \u00A0In recent years, they've gone a lot more mainstream with their editorial policies, not to mention their readership. \u00A0Chances are, though, if you use the Wall Street Journal as your filter on the news, you belong to a somewhat elite community.\nGetting access to the minds and the contacts within that elite community are almost as much of a selling point for ponying up the fee to get behind the paywall as the content itself.\nIn other words, mark it on your calendar folks, because we may be witnessing the first successful attempt to sell access\u00A0to a social network."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/09/17/wsj-emo-redesign/>