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Rupert Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch seems determined to attack his rivals at the New York Times. Photograph: Nati Harnik/AP
Rupert Murdoch seems determined to attack his rivals at the New York Times. Photograph: Nati Harnik/AP

Wall Street Journal goes head-to-head with New York Times

This article is more than 13 years old
Rupert Murdoch's paper launches daily New York section in latest clash with his rival Arthur Sulzberger

In 1950, when Rupert Murdoch was just 19, he was taken on a grand tour of America by his father Keith. Being a powerful media figure in his native Australia, the elder Murdoch was able to present his son in illustrious circles. There was a White House audience with Harry Truman and then, one Sunday, the pair traipsed up to Hillandale, the summer home in Connecticut of the Sulzberger family, the owners of the New York Times.

It was a defining moment for the young Murdoch, one that his biographer Michael Wolff says goes some way towards explaining his lifelong obsession with the Old Gray Lady. "On that visit his father communicated to him the immutable fact that the Sulzbergers were the best newspaper proprietors the world had ever known and the New York Times the best paper," Wolff says. "That message still haunts him today, as Murdoch knows that if he is to secure his legacy as the last and greatest newspaper man then he has to deal with the New York Times."

Today Rupert Murdoch will roll out the next move in his master plan to deal with the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal, the paper he bought at enormous cost 28 months ago, launches a daily section dedicated to taking on his great newspaper rival on its home turf – New York.

The launch of the Journal's new New York section signifies so much more than its face value: an average 12 pages a day of politics, sport, arts, business and property from New York city and around the state. It is not so much the start of a section but of a mission, to take the fight directly to what Murdoch sees as the pompous old-style journalism of the Times and steal its mantle as the foremost newspaper in the land.

Greatly admired

Murdoch is certainly putting his money where his mouth is. At a time when other newspapers are slashing budgets and sacking staff, he is investing $15m a year on the section and has recruited a staff of about 35 journalists, many drawn from the now defunct New York Sun which Murdoch greatly admired. There is much speculation that the Journal will try and undercut the Times by charging advertisers discounted ad rates - a tactic honed in the UK - though the paper denies it has any such intentions.

Murdoch and his team have made no attempt to hide the fact that the purpose behind the new section is to damage the Times, an ambition that was evident even before he bought Dow Jones, the parent company of the Journal, for $5bn in 2007. Sarah Ellison, a former Journal reporter whose book War at the Wall Street Journal is published next month, records how Murdoch was so upset by a scathing New York Times editorial criticising the pending sale to News Corporation that he wrote Arthur Sulzberger, the Times chairman, a note that ended with the flourish: "Let the battle begin!" Soon after he took over the reins of the Journal, Murdoch told a meeting of Dow Jones executives and Journal editors: "We've got to … figure out how to cripple, really cripple the New York Times."

Such bare-knuckle fighting is highly unfamiliar in New York's rather staid newspaper landscape where, for years, the untouchability of the Times has been taken for granted and harsh words seldom heard. "Relations between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal under its previous owners were so understated," Ellison says. "They would rarely speak each other's name in public and it was all very gentlemanly and polite. There was none of this gloves-off attitude."

As the launch of the New York section has approached, the gloves have come well and truly off. Last December Robert Thomson, the former editor of the Times of London whom Murdoch parachuted in as editor-in-chief of the Journal soon after he bought it, lashed out at a critical article in the New York Times. Written by the media writer David Carr, it accused the Journal's political coverage of moving to the right since the takeover. Thomson said Carr's piece was "yet more evidence that the New York Times is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival … Principle is but a bystander at the New York Times."

Then, in February, Murdoch made a personal attack on Sulzberger himself. He told New York magazine that he believed the Times was stuck in the past and vulnerable to attack largely because "Sulzberger remains in place".

As the piece de resistance, the Journal played a little joke on Sulzberger that it clearly found very rib-tickling. On the cover of its Weekend section last month it illustrated a feature on how women from healthier countries prefer effeminate men with a composite photo of a male whose lower face was unmistakably that of Arthur Sulzberger. The implication that the owner of the Times was a girl's blouse was blatant, and reportedly was the idea of Thomson himself. The Journal declined to comment on it.

In pre-Murdoch days, the Times may well have regarded such mischief as quite beneath it and ignored it. But it is significant that the Times is now prepared to hit back.

"The Times has been determined to fight. And that makes it a very different sort of battle than these New York papers have ever seen," Ellison says.

The first counterattack came when the Times poached from the Journal an arts reporter called Kate Taylor; though she was relatively junior, she had been working on the dummy New York section and thus was party to state secrets. The Times also bagged the head of PR at the Journal, Bob Christie, who now acts as Sulzberger's mouthpiece.

Then they unleashed a head-on ad campaign around New York city, including full-page adverts in the Times itself, which underlined the paper's natural local dominance over its rival. Typical was an advert headlined: "The audience for our arts coverage in New York? Standing room only." Underneath it the paper boasted that "over twice the number of arts enthusiasts prefer the Times over the Journal".

Nor would the Times turn the other cheek when Thomson played his prank with the Sulzberger photograph. Sulzberger demanded a clarification and when that wasn't forthcoming his new spokesman Christie told the New York Observer: "The readers and employees of the Wall Street Journal deserve much better than this type of juvenile behaviour from its editor in chief."

As part of its war preparations, the Times carried out a review of its New York coverage in its Metro section, which has been cut back and subsumed into the main section in recent months. The paper is upbeat about its coverage - it recently broke the sex scandal story that brought down the state governor Eliot Spitzer - but it says that it is planning to make changes and improvements to its city coverage, both in the paper and on its website with an iphone app on City life planned.

The Murdoch face-off with Sulzberger is all too easily understood as the kind of playground bullying in which Murdoch has excelled over many years. But what has media analysts mystified is why he should think this expensive brouhaha makes business sense.

The New York section will advance the movement under Thomson's guidance away from the old Wall Street Journal, a crusty financial organ, towards a livelier general interest paper. That is in line with Murdoch's desire to shrug off its reputation for being a specialist "second read" and make it a "complete" newspaper.

The hope is that vibrant local coverage will encourage readers who would normally not dream of buying the paper into reappraising it, thus driving up circulation. The Journal also sees potential in drawing some of New York city's lucrative ad market away from the Times. It says it has already lured big retailers such as Bloomingdales, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue to its side.

But, at a time when newspaper advertising is shrinking and all energy in the industry appears to be relocating to the internet, that still leaves newspaper analysts such as Alan Mutter of the Newsosaur blog deeply puzzled. Why not take the millions News Corporation is spending on the New York section and invest it in new apps for the iPad or iPhone, or on website development?

"What mystifies me is that Murdoch's attack on the Times can in the short term only hurt both papers by costing them both a great deal. And in the medium to long term this is a war of attrition in which there can be no winner."

Ellison has the same struggle to understand the point of it all. Could it be, she asks, "that Murdoch is [still] fighting the last great newspaper war of the 20th century?"

More on this story

More on this story

  • Wall Street Journal chief gets personal in battle with New York Times

  • Rupert Murdoch launches metro edition of Wall Street Journal

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