Having hinted numerous times at a free Wall Street Journal site, Rupert Murdoch said Tuesday that the idea of making the flagship paper's site free to access remains a valid option, reports MediaBuyerPlanner.

"That looks like the way we're going," he said (via MediaPost) during an investor conference.

A free WSJ site might mean a loss of as much as US$ 30 million and a circulation drop of perhaps 15,000. But if the site remains strong, more dollars may come via contextual search and ad support.

Murchoch said that the site could draw an audience perhaps 10 times greater than its current base. That audience would include the "most affluent, the most influential people in the world," and advertisers would pay a premium to reach them.

Perhaps sensing the change in tide, The New York Times yesterday announced plans to stop charging a subscription fee for its archives and columns, leaving the Journal the only major US newspaper to charge for online access (according to the WSJ itself).

The debate about whether to charge for online subscriptions comes as growth in online newspaper ad revenue slows: the rate of growth of online newspaper ads dropped from 33.2 percent during the second quarter of 2006 to 19.3 percent during Q207, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Print ad revenue for most newspapers is seeing a much steeper decline, however, and industry-watchers have debated whether newspapers will be able to offset print losses with online gains. In Q2, seven percent of US$ 11.3 billion (print and online) in newspaper ad revenues came from online sources.