If You were The Former Editor Of The Times Of London And Now You were Publisher Of The Wall Street Journal Wouldn?ft It Make Sense To You To Bring Closer Co-Operation Between Two Such Prestigious Brands?

Philip M. Stone May 9, 2008

It?fs going on just five months since Rupert Murdoch got his hands on Dow Jones and he placed his trusted lieutenants in charge, but already there?fs an inkling of how various Murdoch newspapers around the world are going to really start scratching one another?fs back for the group?fs greater good.

And it is that same thinking that is driving Murdoch’s passion for Newsday that he says he hopes to have wrapped up within seven days. Once he has his hands on that Long Island newspaper then he can lay plans for a new printing facility for not just Newsday, but his New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. No wonder he is talking about the Newsday buy worth about $100 million in production savings.

But although it is still early days at the Journal it is fascinating to see what Publisher Robert Thomson is up to. Before Murdoch moved him into that position Thomson was editor of News International’s ultra-prestigious The Times of London, even though he will go down in history as the man who changed it from a broadsheet to a compact – he told an Australian university audience last year “It took an Australian to shrink it to a tabloid or a compact. We used the ‘c’ word so it was more socially acceptable.”

So, if you were Thomson and you were looking to greatly improve the global footprint of your newspaper, and your mother company owned such great titles as The Times in Europe and The Australian in Australia then doesn’t it make sense for some sort of axis to be formed with each taking from the other what will give each added strength?

And the process apparently is already underway. British newspapers are all agog that the main reason readership of their web sites are as high as they are in the millions is because at least one-third of those visits come from the US. Audited figures for Times Online in March, for instance, showed the site had some 16 million unique visitors with about one third coming from the UK, one-third from the US and the remainder from the rest of the world.

But UK newspapers are having great problems monetizing that foreign readership. Now in The Times’ case its demographic readership is probably pretty similar to the Wall Street Journal’s, the Journal has a great sales force so does it really take rocket science to figure out that if each title did cross-selling for the other that both would benefit?

And then there’s the editorial content. The Times offers very good general business coverage  as do most of the UK quality national newspapers – one reason why the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal Europe have a hard time attracting additional UK readership– so wouldn’t it make sense for The Journal to link to Times stories. And since no one can really beat the Journal for its US coverage doesn’t it make sense that the Times links to the Journal’s coverage.

And then Down Under the Australian-born Murdoch has various media properties including the national Australian newspaper and news.com.au so coverage there offers all sorts of linkage possibilities. (Ever since Murdoch took out naturalized US citizenship in 1985 the Australian newspapers that were so proud that the world’s most successful media entrepreneur was Australian now have to settle for  the description in their stories “Australian-born”).

This type of linkage between like-minded newspapers can be carried out downscale, too, with the tabloids. Why not the UK’s Sun, the New York Post and Australia’s Daily Telegraph all linking on various stories as the needs arise, and maybe there could be cross-selling, too?

And it’s that type of thinking that drives Murdoch’s Newsday buy. There are synergies that could amount to considerable savings if he were to make capital improvements with all three newspapers as ready customers.

Already the unions are assuming that Murdoch is going to win Newsday. The newspaper quotes Dennis Grabhorn, president of the Graphics Communications Conference Local 406 as saying that Murdoch is planning to build a super plant that would print Newsday, The Post and The Journal. Grabhorn said that the tabloid-sized Newsday’s current plant is outdated and cannot print broadsheets such as the Journal.

“He would definitely want new presses,” Grabhorn said, indicating the unions are already discussing division of labor.

Something else they had better discuss – how many jobs will disappear if Murdoch does indeed build that new plant? Just look to the UK where his three new state-of-the-art printing plants have just come on line and the one thing that takes people aback when they visit is how few people there are working at the plants.

Those three plants, that gives Murdoch’s four UK national newspapers color printing capabilities on every page, represented a £650 million investment ($1.3 billion, €845 million). Although color printing is more expensive than black and white, there is so much computer programming and automation built into the new presses -- including laser guided trucks and conveyer belts moving the paper rolls around the plant -- that printing staff numbers were cut by two-thirds, from 600 down to 200, for an estimated annual savings of £13 million ($26 million, €17 million).

And to help pay for the investment the newspapers went on very tight budgets, including editorial, for three years. The plant near London at Broxbourne,  which News International calls the largest printing facility in the world, has 12 full-color Man Roland colorman XXL web-offset presses that can each roll out 86,000 copies an hour compared to the existing 36,000 copies at the old print facility. It handles 5,000 tonnes of paper and 100 tonnes of ink weekly and because of a special NI specification the new presses can handle tabloid and broadsheet printing at the same time – something very important for the New York operation. You can just picture the Man Roland folks praying every day for Murdoch to win Newsday!

And in Murdoch’s sprawling newspaper empire it appears more and more that synergy is becoming the key word of the day.