Rupert Murdoch said Thursday that The Wall Street Journal will continue to charge a fee for full access to its Web site, and indicated that those charges may go up.
Murdoch was quoted by the Journal as saying that WSJ.com would "greatly expand and improve" the portion of the site that is available to non-paying subscribers, but that there will still be a "strong offering" for paying subscribers.
"The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive," the Journal quoted Murdoch as saying.
Murdoch was speaking in response to a question at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Journal reported. Wall Street Journal spokesman Robert Christie didn't dispute the accuracy of what the Journal reported but had no further comment.
Murdoch's News Corp. media conglomerate completed its purchase of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the Journal, in December.
Some material on WSJ.com is free now, but Murdoch has said he was considering opening the site to non-paying subscribers in hopes of building additional advertising revenues, which he said would likely offset lost revenues from subscriber fees.
Speculation has been mounting in the publishing industry about when, whether and to what extent the Journal's Web site would be opened to the public. The Journal currently has about 1 million paying Web subscribers.