New broadsheet WSJ in Europe shouldn’t worry investors

Simon Constable writes for Forbes.com about whether News Corp. investors should be worried about its decision to turn The Wall Street Journal into a broadsheet from its current tabloid format.

Constable writes, “Should Newscorp. investors be worried? Probably they should not.

“The team at the top has deep knowledge of Fleet St. WSJ editor-in-chief Gerald Baker is a veteran of  The Times and the FT. His boss, Dow Jones CEO William Lewis, was editor of The Daily Telegraph. Robert Thomson, CEO of Newscorp., is a veteran of The Times, and The FT. And the big boss himself Rupert Murdoch is a newsman to the core. It was his innovation that led to The Sun Newspaper becoming the biggest circulation paper in the UK partly by tapping an audience that prior to had been thought unreachable.

“There’s another reason not to worry. To be completely fair the whole swath of papers on the newsstand isn’t direct competition. For instance, it’s doubtful that WSJ’s target reader needs to be swayed away from mass-market tabloids such as The Mirror.”

Read more here.