For the first time in a long time, there’s serious newspaper competition in New York—actually, newspaper competition anywhere would be newsworthy… But, New York is the big leagues. NYT vs. WSJ, fight! David Carr says:
The fight bears watching for a few reasons. This is New York, a crucible of city journalism, a place that has seen newspaper wars for almost three centuries. At one time or another, the city has hosted over 20 newspapers, but this time around, it is not a couple of scrappy tabloids in the fray, but broadsheet behemoths with ambitions to match.
I haven’t seen the WSJ NY edition, but I’d like to. For all the wailing about the death of print, you have to give credit to the one man who’s betting on expanding print: Rupert Murdoch. It certainly makes for a striking contrast with Katherine Weymouth, Washington Post publisher, who visited Harvard recently. She spoke as though her job were to bail out a sinking ship (made of newspaper). Mr. Murdoch, dumping $30 million into a New York daily, well, he’s full speed ahead on the Titanic.
Or is he? Maybe the economics do work out. The Times’ greatest costs are its expensive national and foreign bureaus. Since the WSJ already faces these big fixed costs, creating a New York team should be relatively cheap. Here, then, is an affordable way to tap into a the largest local advertising market in America. Then again, maybe Murdoch just wants to get into a fight with the New York Times. Either way, things are heating up in the ink on dead trees market once more…