As If The New York Times Company Doesn’t Have Enough To Worry About With Its Shares Hitting A 12-Year Low, Rupert Murdoch Is Making It Very Plain The NYT Is His Primary Target Once He Gets His Hands On The Wall Street Journal

Murdoch, talking at an Internet conference in San Francisco, went into more detail than ever before on how he plans to boost the Journal’s general news coverage. He says he wants to “improve the paper in every way” by investing more not only in its financial reporting, but he wants much more national and international news, and “I want to add major coverage of the arts, fashion, and culture.” Asked if his aim was to “kill” the Times, Murdoch responded, “That would be nice.”

Murdoch had first given hints back in June in a Time Magazine interview that he had his sites on the Journal competing as a more generalist newspaper aiming at The New York Times. He said then, ““My worry about The New York Times is that it’s got the only position as a national elitist general interest paper. So the network news picks its cues from The Times. And local papers do, too. It has a huge influence. And we’d love to challenge that.”

Times’ executive editor Bill Keller, however, is not going to roll over and die at the threat. He told the New York Observer, “Good journalism for an intelligent general audience is hard. And we’re really good at it. Taking on The Times is not as easy as waving a credit card and proclaiming yourself ‘fair and balanced.’”

One place where Murdoch will likely beef up the Journal’s reporting is Washington. The Journal certainly covers those beats that affect the business world, but it does not, for instance, have reporters assigned to every major presidential candidate. something that the Times and the Washington Post do.

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The Times’ Washington bureau, for instance sees the Post as far more of a competitor than it does the Journal. The New York Observer noted that while numerous copies of The Washington Post are distributed throughout the Times’ Washington bureau significantly fewer reporters receive The Journal. At this point, a staffer said, “it’s not a must-read.”

And it’s that “must-read” within the halls of power and influence in Washington and around the world that Murdoch really craves. More so, for instance, than taking on the Journal’s primary financial newspaper competitor, the Financial Times. Peter Churnin, News Corp president, was asked on a UK visit in September whether News Corp. would also like to buy the FT from Pearson. “We don’t want to buy the FT. News Corp will crush it!” he exclaimed.

The Times currently runs the top newspaper web site in the US with some 13 million monthly visitors, and it operates on the advertising model (having discarded its TimesSelect subscription for part of the site a few weeks back). The Journal, on the other hand, has close to 1 million subscribers to wsj.com and generates about $50 million annually in subscription revenue, not an insignificant amount. But if Murdoch wants to push the WSJ brand more mainstream then he may well decide he could do better in the long-term than that $50 million. Furthermore, only about four percent of the Journal’s web subscribers are from outside the US, so if he really wants to open up the brand globally then switching to the advertising model looks even more likely.

And indeed the Times’ own experience since dumping TimesSelect a month ago encourages that view. The Times was making around $10 million annually from TimesSelect, but it thought it could do better by opening those pages behind the pay wall. Traffic to its Op-ed pages has more than doubled and overall visits to nytimes.com are up by about 10% since the pay wall fell.

And the Financial Times has also opened up its site starting this month. The previously all-subscription site now allows viewing 30 free stories a month (you have to register after viewing five stories) so the trend is certainly there to open things up.

Meanwhile, while the Times’ boardroom may be singing “good riddance” to Hassan Elmasry, fund manager at Morgan Stanley, and his continual attacks on the dual share system, his action as the company’s second largest shareholder of selling the entire holding sends a negative message to Wall Street on the Times Company’s financial future. The shares hit $18.08 on Thursday, a 12 year low, before recovering to close at $18.51.

In the newsroom management will focus on the expected Murdoch onslaught which could require an increased editorial spend to combat. As Executive Editor Bill Keller told the New York Observer, “I don’t know what Murdoch really intends to do, but if his plan is to put money into serious, credible news gathering , that’s good for the country, good for the news business, and good for us.”

Goldman Sachs’ analyst Peter P. Appert has, meanwhile, reiterated his sell recommendation saying little financial can now be expected from the company with the Ochs-Sulzberger families having such complete control, and Elmasry’s throwing in the towel proves nothing will be done about the management structure.

There was no comment, however, from Morgan Stanley’s own media analyst, Lisa Monaco, for she was one of 300 staff fired Wednesday in an unrelated move, and Morgan Stanley says it will no longer be following the newspaper sector. Only just the day before she said given the recent restructuring plans by Belo and E.W. Scripps that other media companies, such as Gannett and Journal Communications, may feel similar pressure to unlock shareholder value. She didn’t count on her being part of Morgan Stanley’s plans to do the same.