As if you needed another reason to loathe Rupert Murdoch.....

[marmar]

from the Independent UK:



Stephen Foley: Round one: battle for news-stands hits New York
Saturday, 24 April 2010


It's the clash that has New York's media community salivating: the Murdochs versus the Sulzbergers, and the bell rings for round one on Monday morning. That is when Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal launches a New York edition, aimed squarely at damaging the Sulzberger family-controlled New York Times, the Old Grey Lady of American newspaper history.

Mr Murdoch has coveted the American Times for as long as he has owned the British namesake, but since buying the Journal in 2006 he has vowed, if you can't buy it, beat it. It promises to be a deliciously scurrilous knockabout – and deadly serious business. For the Times, listing under $671m of debt, Mr Murdoch represents a potentially deadly threat. The exercise is also not without its dangers for the Australian-born mogul. I suspect I know the biggest winner, and it is not either of them.

Even the warm-up sparring has gotten personal, as Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Times, discovered last month. He opened the Journal to find a picture of the lower half of his face used to illustrate a piece about feminine men.

The Journal is said to be steeply undercutting the Times on the rates it charges New York advertisers, something that is raising hackles at Times headquarters, even if they expressed equanimity in public when they reported a return to profit this week. Times bosses claim that 75 per cent of Journal readers also read their paper, so they have little to fear. But that is precisely the figure Mr Murdoch hopes to change. By building a full-service newspaper, complete with local news and gossip, around the Journal's must-read business coverage, it hopes that New York readers will be able to dispense with their copies of the Times all together. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-foley-round-one-battle-for-newsstands-hits-new-york-1953069.html

[SpiralHawk]

1. "But Mercury is Retrograde, Murdoch. Get a clue." - Ronald Reagan's Dead Republicon Astrologer*

"Typical right-wing idiocy. Sheesh."
- Ronald Reagan's Dead Republicon Astrologer*



* Courageously channeled by the dashing & intrepid SH from the vast, stanky netherworld of right-wing occultism. Do not try this at home, kids.

[napi21]

2. I can't speak fr New Yorkers, but I don't think anyone buys the WSJ

or any version of it, for gossip & BS. What a wealthy JO he is! The only salvation I can think of is that he's OLD and won't be harassing us much longer!

[tsuki]

3. His Mother is one hundred.