Staci D. Kramer, co-editor, paidContent: Do you see people using digital more for instant gratification and the print edition for lean back?

Robert Thomson: People’s habits are changing and the way they read is changing. There’s no doubt digital on the various devices will occupy an ever larger space in reading time but, at the same time, there’s print and its tactility and its portability, and you can throw it on the floor—you can’t throw an iPad on the floor just yet. The challenge for us is to be conscious of those changes and not to be too set in our ways and imagine that people’s reading ways are not changing because they are changing more fundamentally at any time in human history.

One of the habits you’ve been trying to change at News Corp is to take the Dow Jones example of having people pay for digital and extend that. … Do you see an acceptance level coming? Do you think the new News Corp. program, whatever it’s introduced as, is going to make a difference in the way people pay for news?

Les Hinton: There’s not a publisher you can talk to in any part of the world in any language who’s not looking at how they can have their journalism paid for. I think it’s broadly recognized now that in the mid-90s the industry globally took a misstep in being so ready to give its information away, its journalism away as readily as it did. We’re working on several models. The Journal, of course, you know very well, Dow Jones also owns a couple of little local dailies where we’re testing various pay models. Our Brits have now launched both an iPad, which appears to be doing very well, as well as just begin putting a paywall up behind a very, very much improved couple of websites. ... That’s the game. We’ve got to establish value, we’ve got to make it worthwhile for people to pay. A lot of other people are doing it.

Thomson: To Les’s point earlier, the core business of Dow Jones is business journalism and there is a propensity for business people to pay wherever they are in the world. The challenge for us is to create verticals with tiering both in content sophistication and price precision. That’s what we’re in the midst of doing with early generation products like WSJ Pro, which people who use it, like it and understand it. It’s instinctive, they understand why they should pay and it’s up to us to give them quality content.

Are you finding any allies in the [News Corp. news] consortium? Are other publishers willing to come in?

Hinton: That’s a News Corp project which Robert and I aren’t directly involved in. We look after our little operation with the Journal.

Do you plan to do Wall Street Journal apps across the different countries that iPads go into?

Hinton: We’re looking at doing that. There are two things that are going to be interesting. We don’t know yet, now that the iPad has gone on sale globally in the last few days, what we’ve yet to see is the extent to which the core U.S. edition, to which a lot of expats in particular can’t see unless they wait a couple of days for it to arrive in the mail to see what kind of uptake we get there, but also our European and Asian editions, which we’re looking at launching. But we haven’t actually decided quite what to do yet.

Do you see an opportunity to maybe have the multiple versions available so that people can choose instead of just picking one that you make available?

Hinton: It’s a good idea.

Thomson: I think you’re absolutely right. You’re going to have multiple versions of papers, you’re going to have specialist content, which is put in a parcel for you because that’s your area of interest—professional interest or personal interest—but the good thing is, frankly, Les is overseeing a culture at the company which is very flexible. It understands that repurposing is a part of what we have to do and as journalists it’s understanding who the audience is, having created that content, repurposing into a parcel in a different language or a different area or speciality and creating something for Les’s team to sell

This has been one of the big philosophical—if you can call anything about an iPad philosophical—debates going on right now. Do you repurpose or do you create for the device? The Kindle, the Nook, all of those are repurposed versions of the Wall Street Journal. Do you see an opportunity to create something when you get to these other tablet devices?

Thomson: Absolutely. The iPad, we’ve obviously repurposed to give a sense of reading a newspaper, which has helped us both editorially and commercially understand the power of the product. But it will really depend on, at the very heart of it you have to have great content, and clearly you have to understand in which context on which canvas people are accessing that content and adapt it to suit that, but there has to be integrity and accuracy in the content.

Hinton: It’s very interesting because when we came to design it we had five weeks to design the iPad and the decision was made to make it as much a replica of the newspaper experience as we could possibly do. Frankly—given the way web browsing and the use of websites have developed—we weren’t quite sure what the response would be but it has been overwhelmingly positive. People love being able to somehow be kind of feeling like they’re reading a newspaper. The same typefaces and approximation of the same design has had a response much more positive, frankly, than I expected.

Rupert said last night there were 10,000 paid WSJ iPad users. Does that include subscribers to the print edition who are getting access?

Hinton: The 10,000 number, which Rupert quoted and which continues to grow on a daily basis by quite good numbers, is the number of people who are paying to receive it at a cost of $3.99 per week solely to receive it on the iPad. There are a number of probably 30,000 now who are existing subscribers to the newspaper or to online who get that as part of this package for the time being.

At what point do you think you might charge for that or do you see it as an incentive to keep me getting everything? Right now, I’m a print subscriber, I’m an online subscriber; I really don’t want to keep paying over and over for it.

Hinton: You’re not the first person to say that to us. But our objective is to have our Wall Street Journal customers use as many as of of the platforms as we can, whether it’s the BlackBerry, whether it’s the iPhone, whether it’s the PC or whether it’s the iPad and all the tablets to come. How we price, how we bundle—all of that is something that we’ll be coming more clear on quite soon.

Is there a chance that what we’ll be talking about is paying a kind of surcharge on top of basic that gives us sort of a passport to everything?

Hinton: That’s one of the possibilities but our key is we’re only going to succeed if we get more and more customers to join us. Our effort is to make sure we have a bundle that is attractively priced so more and more people become our customer.

Do you think some announcements on that are coming soon?

Hinton: In the future, yes.

The Steve Jobs future or the Rupert Murdoch future?

Hinton: (laughing) The future’s a long time, as we heard last night.

Are we looking at some clarity on that this year, do you think? This quarter, next quarter?

Hinton: I think over the next few months we’ll start looking at different pricing models, testing different things. Meanwhile, the iPad is a phenomenon, it’s launched. We’re seeing its growth on a daily basis. It’s very, very strong. We’re, for the moment, looking at that.

Thomson: The other thing to bear in mind is it works as a horizontal, we’re talking about the horizontal-content paper, but it also works as a vertical. As you tell us more about you, we’ll give you a tech feed for which, frankly, we will charge you even more again.