Mediaweek magazine puts together a “Digital Hot List” each year of the websites or companies they see as having the potential to wow the web world. Their list never seems to be much of a surprise, especially when you consider Google, Facebook and Twitter are sort of default entries, but there’s always one or two on it that raise an eyebrow.

This year it’s the Wall Street Journal’s website, WSJ.com, in at No. 8. Yep! The website property of a traditional media outlet is on Mediaweek’s Digital Hot List. And no, it’s not a joke.

To further perplex the digerati, The Journal is one of the few papers that did not take down its pay-to-play subscription model a few years back. That’s right. You have to pay to see much (not all, but still) of the WSJ.com content, a policy considered blasphemous by many in the social media set.

The online audience at WSJ.com has spiked by as much as 44 percent in recent months according to ComScore, it is now the largest newspaper in the U.S. and both the print and online versions are profitable. Mediaweek calls their model the, “envy of