News Corp Says It Wants To ‘Crush’ The Financial Times, But The FT Steadily Increases Its US Circulation – True, Still Way Lower Than The Wall Street Journal’s, And It Is Gearing Up To Fight The ‘Crush’

Well, so far there is no crushing noise being heard – News Corp hopes to close its Dow Jones purchase next month – but both News Corp and Pearson, the FT publisher, are making clear they are getting ready to do battle.

Rupert Murdoch has again emphasized, this time in an interview with his Australian newspaper, that his first focus is to improve the Wall Street Journal in the US. He said he intends to fatten the weekday newspaper by 15-20% and eventually double the size of the Saturday newspaper.

And whereas before Murdoch has given hints that he would kill the Journal’s subscription web site and move to an advertising supported site, The Australian reports as a matter-of-fact, “The subscription fee on the WSJ Internet site will be scrapped with the aim of boosting subscriber numbers from around 1 million to as many as 20 million and boosting advertising revenue to replace the $50 million that would be lost in subscription revenues.”

The newspaper quotes Murdoch saying, “The whole culture of the Internet is to make it free,” and he said specifically that the Australian Financial Review had made a mistake when it made its web site subscriber-supported, so there really does seem to be little doubt about his thinking.

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As If The New York Times Company Doesn’t Have Enough To Worry About With Its Shares Hitting A 12-Year Low, Rupert Murdoch Is Making It Very Plain The NYT Is His Primary Target Once He Gets His Hands On The Wall Street Journal
With New York Times Company shares hitting a 12-year low Thursday and the general outlook being that Morgan Stanley’s sale of its 7.3% of the company merely solidifies the view of no speedy shares recovery, along comes Rupert Murdoch with his clearest words yet on how he wants the Wall Street Journal to knock the Times off its pedestal as America’s most influential read.

It’s Not Just The Financial Times, New York Times and CNBC That Rupert Murdoch Will Target, But With US Newspapers Drastically Reducing Their Business News Pages He’ll Also Try To Make The Wall Street Journal Brand The Choice For The Common Man
Contrary to all the nonsense the Bancrofts and the New York Times put out, Rupert Murdoch is not about to destroy the Dow Jones editorial reputation for which he has paid so much – indeed look for Murdoch’s global plan to make the Wall Street Journal THE US newspaper of record, not just for more of the world’s major business and political decision makers, but also for the common man. If he pulls all of that off then $5 billion will look like chicken feed.

Americans Like To Talk About the 'Big Mo' – Momentum – Although Seldom Heard In The Same Breath As 'Print Media,' But It Looks Like The New Dow Jones Management Is On The Right Track
You can almost feel the earth move. The print and the online operations at Dow Jones are merging. That’s not just the editorial operations but perhaps even more important the sales operations. The emphasis now is ensuring that all channels of information distribution are utilized to their utmost – editorially and also in making sure none of those elusive advertising dollars are left on the table.

Dow Jones Dumps Its Wall Street Journal Publisher and Kicks Her Husband, the Company’s CEO, Upstairs Temporarily to Chairman, Wall Street Rejoices With A One-Day 10% Share Price Increase And With Knight-Ridder For Sale, Traders May Finally Be Seeing Some Results They Like From US Newspapers.
Tony Ridder didn’t have much choice. His three largest shareholders said they wanted to see Knight-Ridder sold to achieve shareholder value and there wasn’t much he could do about it and the sales process is in full swing. But Dow Jones is another matter. While a public company it is still controlled by the Bancroft family and the family really hasn’t been that active in pushing for a better performance. Until now. In one swoop the company ceo is out come February 1 -- kicked upstairs as chairman until he retires in a year -- and his wife, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) publisher, has been given two months to pack up her office.

All Wall Street Really Wanted to Finally Rocket US Newspapers Shares Up Was Some Good News, And This Week, Finally, The Industry Delivered. And so Did Wall Street
First it was the New York Times that reported, unexpectedly, that its November advertising revenue grew 5,8% from November, 2004. Then the Wall Street Journal announced a 34.3% gain in classified advertising from the same month a year ago. Sure, this year there are the Saturday editions but it was clear to Wall Street that something positive was happening.

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The Australian itself has added a branded page of WSJ news to its business section as well as using other Dow Jones newswire stories and WSJ stories within the newspapers and on its web site. It used to run Financial Times articles.

So when the newspaper asked Murdoch whether he might bring the Asian Wall Street Journal into Australia his reply was quite telling, “I’d hope we could continue to improve the financial section of The Australian to the point where that is not necessary.”

As more than one media analyst has since noted, if Murdoch has added the WSJ and Dow Jones articles to The Australian, can the Times of London and The Sunday Times be far behind, especially so since speculation is rife that Robert Thomson, editor of The Times, is said to be Murdoch’s choice as the new Journal publisher?

But with The Journal’s 2,011,862 US circulation plus about another 170,000 between the European and Asian editions, The Journal is still far ahead of the Financial Times – its total global circulation is 449,385. But the FT, having withstood three hard years of losses, is now on the mend and in the October audited circulation numbers it was the only UIK quality newspaper to actually show a year-on-year increase in sales, up 2.2%.

More than two-thirds of the newspaper’s total circulation comes from outside the UK although the UK and Ireland are its highest circulation area with 142,108 copies. The US is not far behind, however, at 135,812 copies, and that number went up 9,200 over September, a 6.75% increase.

And that figure is more noticeable when taking into account that The Journal’s circulation has been slipping in the past year, particularly in the past six months. In the last audited numbers released at the end of October, The Journal’s circulation dropped by 1.53% to 2,011,862 on an annual basis, perilously close to its 2 million psychological bar, and since last March the drop was 50,430 copies (2.5%), indicating the circulation drop is accelerating.

The US credit crisis, top CEOs quitting at such big institutions as Citi and Merrill Lynch, have no doubt spurred the FT’s US readership, and no doubt the newspaper will concentrate on continuing to break stories in that news cycle to further boost its US presence. FT chief executive John Ridding explained, “The continued increase in circulation reflects the quality and relevance of our reporting on the big business stories breaking around us.”

And the FT is clearing its financial decks, so to speak, building a war chest to concentrate more on its flagship newspaper, to increase its circulation globally. Pearson says it has finalized its sale of the French financial daily Les Echos to France’s richest industrialist, Bernard Arnault, via his LMVH luxury items company. Price is €140 million cash ($200 million, £96 million) and the transaction should complete by year’s-end.

The company has been trying to sell its 50% share of Financial Times Deutschland (the other 50% is owned by Bertelsmann subsidiary Gunnar & Jahr) and it thought it has a deal with Germany’s Spiegel Magazine but the employees there are said to have rejected the purchase, and no recent word whether those negotiations are continuing. That newspaper, started in 2000, has a has a circulation of around 100,000, but it is not forecast to break even until 2008.

And in getting ready for Murdoch’s expected switch to an advertiser-supported WSJ.com, FT.com has already adapted, now allowing the first 30 articles accessed a month to be free.

Financially, FT publishing is doing well – Pearson had been under a lot of pressure to sell the newspaper and concentrate on its educational business – but the group says advertising is up 9%, even with the recent credit crunch, and Pearson chief executive Marjorie Scardino says she expects the newspaper to continue with its double-digit profit margins.

So, while Murdoch concentrates his efforts for the Journal first in the US with Europe then to follow, the FT will continue to nibble at the Journal’s heels in the US while at the same time strengthening its sales positions globally. There is no question that News Corp has deeper pockets than Pearson, but the quality of journalism is very much in play here, and it should be a good old-fashioned battle to see if the FT can beat the Journal editorially on the really big ones on its own turf, and if so what Murdoch does about it.