'Wall Street Journal' to raise cover price

Starting on July 28, the Wall Street Journal will raise its cover price from $1.50 to $2, putting it on a par with the Financial Times. Interestingly, the hike comes as the paper's editors are being urged to think more about how they can use the front page to boost newsstand sales, reports Jeff Bercovici in Portfolio.com

An industry source says distributors are unhappy about the way the Journal has handled the increase, giving them just two weeks of advance notice and offering them only 5 cents per copy of additional revenue.

It's also bound to cost the Journal some readers, says Vercovici, unless, of course, that new, zippier front page really is that much more appealing to newsstand browsers. After the paper increased its cover price from $1 to $1.50 last year, average single copy sales fell by about 8 percent.