WSJ Stops Charging for Access to Its Web Site.

Any doubt?

No.

So, the Financial Times is next.

As Jeff Jarvis says in a terrific post:

It’s the relationship that is valuable.

It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution.

That is the essential media moral of the internet story.

It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for, but they’ve finally learned it.

That is the lesson of the death of TimesSelect.

Jeff also tells this great story:

I remember Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, giving a speech in which he ridiculed the revenue TimesSelect brought in.

In his beloved PowerPoint, Rusbridger showed a picture of the new Times headquarters and said that the revenue from TimesSelect wouldn’t even pay the gas bill for the place.

(Illustration by Vince Natale/NYT)

The Financial Times is not doing very well.

As I said before, FT has to become a compact paper: berliner or tabloid, but compact.

Easy to read.

Easy to handle.

Can you imagine The Economist as a broadsheet?

No.

But not everthing is going wrong — at least they are doing great ads about the British pink financial paper.

(Click on the ads to see them bigger)

Shares of Dow Jones gained almost 2% to close at $59.01 Friday on news that Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times was seeking partners for a joint counteroffer for the company that would compete with Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion bid.

One company Pearson has approached is General Electric, which owns business news channel CNBC.

If, on the other hand, Murdoch acquires Dow Jones, the Journal will compete more directly with the FT in Europe and Asia, and News Corp.’s plans for a Fox News business channel — which would compete with CNBC — will gain traction.

The Bancrofts, who are reluctant to put the Journal’s editorial integrity in Murdoch’s hands, are expected to warm to a Pearson approach, but it is viewed as “a long shot” because of the difficulty of three-way mergers, the lack of a leader, and the expensive problem of cashing out the company’s shareholders.

This is part of the dirty Dow Jones war.

FT?

No way!

If they are not able to fix their own circulation and advertising problems, how are they going to fix Dow Jones’?

The Financial Times is raising its UK weekday cover price from £1 to £1.30, while in the US, The Wall Street Journal has elected for a 50% rise to $1.50.

The FT’s Saturday edition is also going up from £1.50 to £1.80.

Next?

The New York Times.

Last week, Time Warner Chairman-CEO Richard D. Parsons, who told a media conference audience in London:

“I’m going to say something I shouldn’t say.

I worry about CNN more now than I do about CNN.com.”

Well…

Let me say in the same way that:

I worry about The New York Times more now than I do about nytimes.com

I worry about The Guardian more now than I do about guardia.co.uk

I worry about El Pais more now than I do about elpais.es

I worry about The Asahi Shimbun more now than I do about asahi.com

I worry about USA Today more now than I do about usatoday.com

I worry about La Repubblica more now than I do about repubblica.it

I worry about The Wall Street Journal more now than I do about online.wsj.com

I worry about Clarin more now than I do about clarin.com

I worry about Die Welt more now than I do about welt.de

I worry about El Mundo more now than I do about elmundo.es

I worry about The Sidney Morning Herald more now than I do about smh.com.au

I worry about Reforma more now than I do about reforma.com

I worry about the Financial Times more now than I do about ft.com

I worry about O Globo more now than I do about oglobo.globo.com

I worry about Le Figaro more now than I do about lefigaro.fr

I worry about El Mercurio more now than I do about emol.com

I worry about Il Corriere della Sera more now than I do about corriere.it

I worry about El Tiempo more now than I do about eltiempo.com

I worry about the Dagens Nyheter more now than I do about dn.se

I worry about the South China Morning Post more now than I do about scmp.com

I worry about Zero Hora more now than I do about clicrbs.com.br

I worry about the Kleine Zeitung more now than I do about kleinezeitung.at

I worry about The Globe and Mail more now than I do about theglobeandmail.com

I worry about El Nuevo Dia more now than I do about endi.com

I worry about Argumenti i Fakti more now than I do about aif.ru

I worry about Helsingin Sanomat more now than I do about hs.fi

I worry about Segodnya more now than I do about segodnya.au

I worry about 24 Heures more now than I do about 24heures.ch

I worry about Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung more now than I do about faz.net

I worry about Gazeta Wyborcza more now than I do about gazetawyborcza.pl

Robert Thompson is the editor of the London Times.

Rupert Murdoch hired him when he was in New York working for the Financial Times.

The FT’s circulation in the U.S. was just 45,000 copies a day.

By 2002, U.S. circulation had increased to 150,000 copies.

He knows business media.

And he is the key editor behind the Murdoch bid for Dow Jones.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting profile of Robert Thompson that includes these paragraphs:

Mr. Thomson and Mr. Murdoch have an unusually close relationship, said people who know them both.

They share Australian roots and a birthday (March 11, 30 years apart).

Both married women from China and have young children. Wendi Murdoch and Mr. Thomson’s wife, Wang Ping, get along well and speak Mandarin to each other, say people who know them.

The two families have vacationed together.

Kim Fletcher, a British media commentator and former editor of the Independent on Sunday newspaper, said that sharing vacations represents an “astonishing closeness” between the newspaper owner and his editor.

“When Thomson was appointed [Times editor], he was seen to have come from nowhere because he wasn’t on the general newspaper scene — he was from a business-newspaper background,” Mr. Fletcher said.

Mr. Thomson grew up in a working-class family in the Australian bush and got his first full-time job at age 17 in 1979 at Melbourne’s Herald, an evening paper once edited by Mr. Murdoch’s father, Sir Keith Murdoch.

Mr. Thomson missed out on a position as a trainee journalist and became an errand boy instead.

A year later, he became a reporter.

At night, he studied for his journalism degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

In the early 1980s, he moved to the Sydney Morning Herald. Through a sharing arrangement with the Financial Times, the paper sent him to Beijing as a reporter.

In 1989, Mr. Thomson covered the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests by the Chinese army. He was in the square when a group of soldiers started beating up another reporter, Jonathan Mirsky of Britain’s Observer newspaper.

Mr. Thomson helped pull away Mr. Mirsky, both men recall.

(…) In 2004, the Times had an $89-million loss, according to a person familiar with its accounts. Next year, the paper is expected to make a profit, this person said.

“Rupert Murdoch gets little credit for seeing the Times through the difficult years,” Mr. Thomson said in an email. “It’s fair to say that we are famous for being a not-for-profit” organization, he jokes.

The Times has lost money for most of the time it has been owned by Mr. Murdoch, according to several former editors.

Tall, thin and with a slight stoop because of a back problem, Mr. Thomson is approachable and rarely shows anger, said people who have worked with him.

With a soft voice and an eccentric style of dress — he is fond of thin ties — he stood out in the newsroom, said people who have worked with him.

Not a bad editor.

For the old Times of London…

Or for the new Wall Street Journal.

This is a recent picture of Rupert Murdoch and NY mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Murdoch hosted the 9th annual presentation of the Eric Breindel awards for opinion writing.

And it is an interesting one because Bloomberg could offer more than $5 billion for Dow Jones.

Bloomberg is a private company, but its value must be around $20 billion.

Bloomberg has all kinds of media: real-time computer financial news, radio, television, magazines… but not a newspaper.

Ten years ago, my wife, Deborah Withey, was asked to develop a prototype for a Bloomberg newspaper.

Very factual.

Very graphic.

Short stories.

A few pages.

Broadsheet.

She did a great prototype with the help of a Bloomberg journalist in Detroit, our friend Doran Levin, a former business columnist for the Detroit Free Press.

But the project didn’t go ahead.

So… perhaps now is the perfect time for a business newspaper.

Bloomberg needs to confront the threat of the new Thompson-Reuters.

Right now, nothing would add more value to Bloomberg than The Wall Street Journal.

And if not the WSJ, what about the Financial Times?

In big media consolidation times, Bloomberg needs to expand.

At the end of the day, for Murdoch… Bloomberg could become a more difficult dealmaker to handle than the poor Brancrofts.
(Photo by Getty Images)

London, September 12, 2005:

A dummy page that was published by accident at the Financial Times.

Thanks to Vassaeggen.