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Journalists at The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau were surprised in early March to step on to their Connecticut Avenue sidewalk and find that they could now use a credit card to buy their own paper. For years, the second largest US daily - and the most expensive - has been leading an industry push to reposition printed news as a high-value product. Yet the coin-box technology driving North American single-copy sales - often requiring exact change in a single denomination - was not ready for a shift to $2 newspapers.
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