Jon Miller, new CEO of News Corp.'s Digital Media Group, told the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena today that some Internet experiences need to be paid for.
"One of those things as we look at the industry overall is going to be premium journalism. It has to have some underpinning of a paid model to be as vibrant as it's been and we are absolutely engaged in that. We have to support premium journalism with a real business model underneath."
News Corp., of course, owns the WSJ, which has a million or so paid subscribers to its online operation. Whether that model can be adapted for general news sites has been a long-running question in journalism circles.