What if the FT started raiding the WSJ newsroom?

Slate.com media critic Jack Shafer theorizes that the Financial Times could make some serious inroads in the United States by raiding The Wall Street Journal newsroom if News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is successful in buying its parent, Dow Jones & Co., which could send dozens of its journalists out the door.

Shafer wrote, “If poaching of a few of the Wall Street Journal‘s 700 reporters and editors by Condé Nast’s Portfolio is considered news, imagine the stir the pillaging of the Journal newsroom by the FT would create. Grand talent raids are common in the law biz, where ambitious firms cripple competitors by looting, say, an entire tax division, and having the defectors bring their clients with them.

“The London-based FT moves about 140,000 copies a day in the United States compared to the Wall Street Journal‘s 2 million. The FT could stand to win hundreds of thousands of new readers if it made a highly visible raid on the Journal—none of this one-or-two-Journal-staffers-at-a-time stuff—and promised to uphold the pre-Murdoch Journal‘s reputation for excellence, accuracy, and integrity.”

“If you estimate an average head-count cost of $200,000-$250,000 for each purloined Journalist, the FT would be adding $25 million or so to its editorial budget. That looks like a lot, but it’s far from the $5 billion Murdoch has bid for all of Dow Jones. Of course, many of the Journal‘s most talented will be booking departures upon the arrival of Rupert Murdoch. But if a great mass of them left at the same time for the FT, the raid could cut into Journal circulation. I imagine the FT placing full-page ads in the New York Times business section.”

Read more here. Shafer names reporters and editors he’d cherry pick first.