Two stories about our flagship paper Wall Street Journal were breaking this week. First the announcement that Robert Thomson, "a man of Rupert Murdoch", has been named Managing Editor of the paper. And today, we hear from Dow Jones' CEO Les Hinton that the Journal will leave Wall Street and move to the News Corp. building in 1211, Sixth Avenue, "within a few blocks of New York Times" as paidcontent.org points out.
Over the last weeks, I followed the discussions in the blogosphere. Even if many bloggers clearly don't like Murdoch, the better arguments are coming from commentators who are in favor of his strategy.
Where is Rupert Murdoch taking the Journal? That was the first question and most of the experts were guessing that he wanted to position the paper against the FT, with a global focus.
Now we know better. The fight will be a local one. Murdoch is going to challenge the New York Times with more political, cultural and general news.
"That's exactly what American Newspapers need right now", writes Simon Constable in The Street.com. At the moment, the
FT's John Gapper believes that the strategy will face a couple of problems. First of all, the Times has more experience in covering general news. Secondly, it will dilute the brand. "The Journal has a dominant position and a clear and unambiguous image as a business and financial paper." And Murdoch might lose the battle if he turns it into a "watered down and right-wing version of the New York Times".
Ironically it's the commentator from the New York Times itself, Tim Arango, who defends Murdoch: "WSJ's business readers won't desert it, because they can't and because its business coverage is better and more comprehensive than ever. But at the same time, Murdoch's trying to attract new readers, who might only want to read one newspaper and who might prefer the WSJ to the NYT."
You might not like his attitude to streamline an organisation but it could be the way to bring back the old glory of the Newspaper business.
