Newspapers
New York in the coming age of Rupert
By Lisa Snedeker
Apr 25, 2008 - 9:03:32 AM

With Rupert Murdoch moving at a brisk pace to revamp The Wall Street Journal and the likelihood that he will also close the deal to buy Long Island's Newsday, New York’s media landscape is in for dramatic change, everyone agrees.

The big question is just what that landscape will look like. Where will the New York Daily News end up in all this? And what about The New York Times?

Here's a likely scenario, though admittedly one of many. Call it the When Murdoch Rules scenario. It assumes what many suspect, that Murdoch's ambition is to become New York's most powerful publisher and that he has a plan well in place to do just that.

Murdoch will first aim to marginalize Mort Zuckerman’s Daily News by marshalling the combined forces of the Post and Newsday to dominate the market.

He stands a good chance of pulling that off, in the view of analysts.

“I think Murdoch overall is going to be the only tabloid newspaper publisher in New York,” observes John Morton, longtime newspaper industry analyst.

On the advertising front, Murdoch will sell the Post and Newsday as a package, giving him a huge advantage over Zuckerman, able to offer advertisers a far larger audience--1.1 million copies weekdays versus 700,000 or so--in one buy. As another industry observer, Henry Scott of New York’s Gansevoort Media, notes, advertisers would have no reason to give their business to the News.

With the Post-Newsday combo, Murdoch would be able to create what decades ago the Daily News enjoyed and what Newsday tried and failed to achieve in the eighties and nineties with its New York edition, New York Newsday.

That's a daily newspaper that's the dominant read of middleclass New Yorkers, from Manhattan to the four outer boroughs to the full length of Long Island.

Key to this strategy would be revamping the Post, shedding its trashy tabloid journalism for the quality journalism Newsday was long known for.

Murdoch would have every reason to do it. With the News no longer a contender, he could easily move upmarket with no worries of losing readers or advertisers.

Would Murdoch change his beloved Post? Bet on it. He may be a tabloid publisher, but he also publishes respected papers like the Times of London. And he's never had qualms about changing his papers to fit the market.

But it wouldn't be just the News that felt the brunt of Murdoch's aggressions. He would be targeting the Times as well.

Great newspaper that it is, the Times is first a national and international paper, with far less interest in covering its home city. As a metropolitan daily, it's stood above the fray of the tabloids, covering the New York it chose to cover.

As Gansevoort's Scott puts it, “The Times no longer is a New York City newspaper. It just happens to own an office building here.”

With the News less a worry, Murdoch could challenge the Times directly, putting the two papers' editorial resources out on the street with the aim of beating the Times on every story, and filing that many more stories about the city. It's hard to imagine the Times responding, especially at a time when it's committed to reducing the size of its editorial staff.

Creating this super paper would fulfill a lot of Murdoch’s needs. "It would mean certain bragging rights and significant political clout,” says Scott.

But it would also better Murdoch's competitive position as he sets about challenging the Times on the national and international level with his revamped Wall Street Journal. He would be challenging the Times on two fronts.

That’s already underway. Since Murdoch took over the Journal in December, the paper has turned to reporting more general-interest news and running shorter stories in an effort to appeal to a broader audience. More changes are coming that will bring the two papers head to head as competitors for readers and advertisers.

Does it all sound far-fetched, this When Murdoch Rules scenario?

It's not, and one need only look to Murdoch's rise in the UK to see just how plausible it is.

In the late 1960s, Murdoch gambled his media holdings in Australia to buy the UK’s News of the World, a downmarket tabloid. Next came the Sun, which he turned into a successful tabloid. He then bought the upmarket Times and Sunday Times and made them over, bringing them downmarket to be more attractive to a larger audience.

New York of today is beginning to look a lot like London a few years back. Or it soon will if Murdoch has his way.