The value of financial journalism and high-quality journalism is that you can charge for it. Rupert MurdochHere’s the best take on the Dow Jones bid, written back in January 2007 by David Warsh:

It is the ticker and its history that is the secret of why the On-line WSJ makes so much money on the Web, $80 million worth of annual subscriptions, while virtually all other newspapers are unable to turn a penny.

The intersection of these several revenue streams supports a formidable fixed newsgathering cost. Dow Jones today distinguishes between its Consumer Media group (The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, the Far East Economic Review) and its Enterprise Media Group (the Dow Jones News Wires, the Online WSJ, Factiva retrieval service and the recently acquired web-based MarketWatch), but the fact is that many of its two thousand or so news professionals serve the print paper, the online paper and the newswire (600 journalists on the print paper alone).

The newswire moves up to 12,000 items a day, covering all asset classes; based on reporting from nearly 90 bureaus around the world.

This is all about paid content. So when USA Today asks if

“folks on Wall Street are…ready to trust getting their financial news from the media mogul who has given us Homer Simpson, Simon Cowell, Bill O’Reilly and the New York Post‘s famous Page Six gossip franchise?”

You have to ask: ‘How dumb do you think your readers are to write that as an intro?’ Too dumb to pay for content, that’s for sure.