Bloomberg declined to confirm the plan to WSJ but the company says it’s “in the process of evaluating various approaches”, which doesn’t rule it out either.

Like Reuters.com, Bloomberg.com is free, but Kevin Krim, who heads the company’s online consumer media division, reportedly believes that some users can be charged between $600 to $1,000 for certain areas of news they currently get for nothing.

Bloomberg.com users don’t get the deep financial data and analysis that Professional users do, so there is scope to add a little something to a Bloomberg.com feed to make it more valuable. Unlike your average newspaper, Bloomberg has experience in making money from online subscribers and has hundreds of thousands of them (300,000 as of October this year)—this is more a question of whether its free-to-air portal can attract users not quite willing to splash out on a Professional subscription but who are still willing to pay for some business news.