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.
“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.
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