Bear Stearns, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal

TheDeal.com executive editor Yvette Kantrow notes Monday that New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin‘s scoop last week about J.P. Morgan upping its offer to purchase Bear Stearns signifies that it knew it had the story to itself.

Kantrow wrote, “Unlike many scoops these days, it was strictly a print affair; it did not appear on the Times’ Web site Sunday night before showing up in the paper’s Monday edition.

“That decision indicated a fair amount of certainty by the Times that it was alone on this story and was in little danger of being beaten by its (temporarily) downtown rival, The Wall Street Journal. It guessed right. The WSJ’s front page Monday was starkly devoid of any Bear Stearns news, as was the rest of the paper. The omission was glaring, given how effectively the WSJ had covered Bear the previous week.

“And it did not go unnoticed by the media punditocracy. Over at Slate, Jack Shafer pinned the Journal’s ‘getting trounced on the month’s biggest business story’ squarely on Rupert Murdoch, who is keen on broadening the paper’s focus beyond business news.”

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