Michael Agar sends me these comments from Hamish McRae of The Independent in London about how the brand of the print medium helps writers reach the global market in a way that a purely online service would find harder to do:
Journalists inevitably find it difficult to comment dispassionately on events in their own industry, and the bid by Rupert Murdoch for Dow Jones is no exception.
But the fact that Mr Murdoch should feel Dow Jones is worth so much more than the market had previously valued it at says something interesting about the way in which the newspaper industry is adapting to the new technologies.
A couple of caveats.
We don’t know the wider motive behind the bid and in particular whether it is a lever for Mr. Murdoch to achieve something else.
Nor do we fully know the embedded value within Dow Jones of the electronic side of the business, for this is not just a specialist newspaper.
What we do know is that Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal are two of the top half dozen brands in the global financial and economic information business.
The issue the group faces, as with all newspapers, is to figure out how to adapt the services it provides to the new opportunities that digital media offer.
The best information on all this comes from the US.
The Newspaper Association of America collates the data and, seen in the big, it makes encouraging reading.
For example, the unique audience of U.S. newspaper websites in the first quarter of this year in the U.S. was running at 59 million, up from 42 million in the first quarter of 2005.
The average time per person was 45 minutes, up from 37 minutes two years ago.
So the market is both widening and deepening.
Newspaper web readers are also an upmarket lot.
For example, more that half have graduated from university, 90 per cent are in jobs, 63 per cent check news daily and 64 per cent have recently checked classified ads online.
From an advertiser’s point of view, this makes them attractive, enabling them to increase their reach but, of course, there are plenty of other sites on which they can advertise: why should they choose newspaper ones?
The first is that The Wall Street Journal has pioneered the paid-for newspaper website.
It has achieved much less market penetration than its free competitors, as you would expect, but the model seems to have worked for it.
The other is that brand extension is easier in financial and economic information and other services than it is in general information.
In other words, the Dow Jones and WSJ names have more traction with people interested principally in finance than, say, The New York Times brand has for people interested mainly in its more general news agenda.
The Journal gives a better base to sell other services than does the Times.
What happens next?
Well, we don’t know Mr .Murdoch’s mind, nor do we know whether he will succeed in this venture.
But what we can see is the rising global demand for high-quality financial and economic information – and judgement.
McRae’s point, says Agar, is simply to show that not only is the market for financial information global, the market for financial ideas is global too.
And that requires human interaction between people who trust each other and want to kick ideas around.
That is where brand comes in.
While it is perfectly possible to develop online “viewspapers,” in practice, the brand of the print medium helps writers reach the global market in a way that a purely online service would find harder to do.
There is life in the old dog yet!
I agree.