Rupert Murdoch speaking about Dow Jones at the 2007 annual News Corporation stockholders’ meeting on October 19, 2007:
This strategic acquisition includes not only The Wall Street Journal, the world’s pre-eminent business newspaper, but other prestigious brands and a range of content that will provide us with remarkable reach and flexibility in the growing business news sector.
There is a real hunger … not just in the United States, but across the globe … for financial news
Some interesting remarks from Rich Zannino, Dow Jones CEO, in his last (short) Dow Jones & Company Incorporated third quarter 2007 earnings conference call.
For the past 20 months or so, we’ve been winning in this new media environment by urgently transforming Dow Jones from a company heavily reliant on newspaper publishing to a more content-driven and diversified media company.
We’re well on our way to achieving our goal of being the world’s best provider of high quality business and related content across all consumer and enterprise media channels.
Our online subscription revenue was up 12% in the third quarter, as paid online Journal subs were up over 25% to 989,000.
Our average monthly unique visitors were up nearly 20% to about 17 million in the quarter, with page views up an even greater 34% to 383 million pages.
We are not the wounded and malnourished media dinosaur that many in the press have recently portrayed us to be.
On the contrary, our financial, operating and journalistic performance over the past 20 months is proof that today we are a fast-growing, thriving and vibrant company: one positioned for a very bright future.
The New York Sun has very good local news on its front page today.
A new Madonna for the Metropolitan Museum.
James Gardner writes about Ludovico Carracci’s “Madonna and Child with Saints” a gift of Mark and Rachel Fisch, clearly steeped in the late 16th-century mannerist traditions of central Italy.
Welcome to the front page, arts and culture!
I know The Sun’s editor Seth Lipsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter.
When he was the editor in chief of the FORWARD weekly, my wife, Deborah Withey, was hired to redesign the influential New York Jewish paper as a daily.
This weekly was and still is very well known for its arts and culture coverage.
Seth has a first-class record in this area and when I saw this beatiful painting at the top of the front page today, I said to myself, well done!
He is right.
Arts and culture sell.
Go to any museum and you’ll see lots of young people.
Go to any opera house and you’ll see lots of young people.
Go to any ballet and you’ll see lots of young people.
Go to any concert and you’ll see lots of young people.
Go to any art gallery and you’ll see lots of young people.
Do you want to attract young readers?
Cover cultural issues.
More and better.
On the front page too!
You know the big news:
In a surprisingly strong move, the Federal Reserve unanimously voted to cut its overnight interest rate target by a half percentage point to 4.75% Tuesday, citing turmoil in financial markets as a threat to economic growth.
And here you have how a few U.S. newspapers presented the news.
The most striking thing for me is that only a few papers did something dramatic.
That said, some of them did it very well with strong graphics and, more important, with what’s next, why, and what it means to you stories.
Well done! And shame to the 99% that were, as usual, sleeping.
This quality popular tabloid from California has excellent poster front pages.
And the headlines are quite good.
The Wall Street Journal, surprise!, goes soft and calm with a sober chart that doesn’t explain too much.
The Record’s graphic approach was very different and asked an excellent question: Are there more cuts to come?
The same graphic idea but with a full package of what’s next journalism.
Brilliant!
A less dramatic presentation but a meaningful one from North Carolina.
The New York Times did a “sushi graphic” that works and headlines for interesting analysis pieces.
The European newspapers couldn’t elaborate too much but at least the Financial Times in Germany did a good job with this well-planned in advance graphic panel that only needed to add the percent of the final cut.
The first decision will have this headline:
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)
A smart New York friend of mine sent me his two cents on Murdoch and Dow Jones:
First, Murdoch doesn’t invest $5 billion to lose money or destroy the product he buys.
He’s not an idiot.
He’ll put money into the WSJ to build it up.
He gives his readers what they want.
Readers of the SUN want naked breasts, and he gives them Page Three.
Readers of the WSJ want solid, reliable business news.
He’ll make damn sure they get it or he can kiss his five billion goodbye.
And, as he joked in an interview with TIME: if they want Page 3 girls in the WSJ, he’ll make sure they all have MBA’s.
As far as political slant, the WSJ editorial policy is already so far to the right that it makes Murdoch look like a flaming liberal.
So, my bottom line is that he won’t destroy the WSJ, he may make it better, and he will squeeze every ounce of energy
out of the staff which is probably what has them all up in arms in the first place.
Amen.
(Photo by David Mariuz)
Be ready tonight for the first authorized iPhone Reviews.
A small group of journalists were given Apple iPhones in advance of the June 29 launch, under strict nondisclosure agreements that specified when they could publish or broadcast their reviews.
Apple 2.0 has learned that that moment is today at 9 p.m., New York time.
Go to the reviews from Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and David Pogue (in the picture) of the New York Times.
They will more than positive.
Ken Auletta, media correspondent from The New Yorker, writes a long story about the Murdoch bid for Dow Jones.
Read it and you will see how the deal is almost done.
Money, money, money.
Don’t be confused.
The Bancrofts don’t care about quality journalism.
They never re-invested their profits.
They were there just for the easy and big dividends.
While Dow Jones was left behind by Bloomberg, Thompson, Reuters…
So, Murdoch can do it better.
Like him or not.
He is a newspaper publisher.
As Jeff Jarvis says in his great blog, they are just “absentee owners.”
On the Wired Campus, Jeffrey R. Young reports:
Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal’s personal-technology columnist, picked up his review copy of the Apple iPhone this morning (June 11), and he gave his initial impressions of the much-anticipated gadget to college leaders during a speech at The Chronicle’s Presidents Forum (…)
“I don’t know whether I’ll give it a good review or not,” he said, noting that he will use the phone for the next couple of weeks before writing his review.
“I can already see some things I don’t like about it. I see some other things that I do like a lot about it.”
He said a crucial question was whether the iPhone’s touch-screen keypad is an adequate replacement for the keyboards on BlackBerries and other advanced cellphones.
“They are claiming that through clever software they have figured out a way for this to be actually far more accurate and efficient than you think it will be, and I’m testing that proposition,” he said.
“And I can tell you that in the first hour it works a little better than I thought, but I’m still not sure it works as well as a regular keyboard — and the first hour is not a very fair test, so I’m going to keep going at it.”
Mr. Mossberg named cellphones as one of the top three technologies to watch at the moment, arguing that the era of the PC is ending (…)
“This is the next level or elevation of the cellphone,” he said of the iPhone.
“Not because it’s better or necessarily better than your Blackberry … but this runs a real computer operating system” and therefore can offer full-featured e-mail software on the go.
I had brunch today in New York with a former editor of The Wall Street Journal.
His opinion:
The Murdoch bid is an offer that the Bancroft family can not refuse.
Why?
Because the $5 billion bid is big, big money.
The Bancrofts will not get more than that.
If they refuse the offer, the management, the journalists and the shareholders of Dow Jones will ask them to invest more… and at the same time the value of the stock could deteriorate very quickly.
So… get the money now and run.
Robert Thompson is a good friend of the current editor of The Wall Street Journal.
And Murdoch has more plans for the future than the lazy Bancrofts, who are interested mainly in good dividends.
It makes a lot of sense.
