The Wall Street Journal is valuable to advertisers because it reaches investors and executives better than any other newspaper. Turning it into a general-circulation newspaper doesn’t make sense – especially when $10/month doesn’t even cover the cost of newsprint and delivery of the newspaper. To advertisers, it’s like merging Seventeen magazine with Field & Stream. There aren’t many companies who need to advertise to 13-year-old girls and 28-year-old hunting and fishing advocates.
NewsCorp already has a general-circulation New York newspaper. It’s called the Daily News. Instead of putting sports on the back page, they could flip the newspaper upside down, and have two newspapers, one upside down from the other, with the second newspaper offering reporters and editors that are literate, and have some sense of journalistic ethics. Call the second front page the Daily Times. News dealers could put out two stacks, one with each front page, showing, and people could buy either one they want to be associated with; once they get it inside their homes, they can read whatever they want to, the point being that if you sell to families you need to be advertising in Daily News and Daily Times, and if you sell to business, you need to advertise in the Wall Street Journal.
Rupert Murdoch had his 79th birthday a couple of weeks ago. He’s done some remarkable things in the past, and given that nobody really knows how to deal with the fact that newspapers are now obsolete, it’s hard to fault him. On the other hand, he’s starting to make some really incredible mistakes. Charging for access to news when television stations are all too happy to give it away for free is one of them. This stunt is another. It’s obviously time for him to retire before he runs NewsCorp into the ground.
