The two-year-old Wall Street Journal weekend magazine and the newspaper’s daily New York City section are profitable, reports Brett Pulley of Bloomberg News, who interviewed Dow Jones & Co. CEO Les Hinton.
Pulley writes, “The Dec. 4 issue of WSJ., the first under former Conde Nast editor Deborah Needleman, will be ‘significantly profitable’ and lift the lifestyle magazine project past ‘break even,’ Hinton said in an interview. The seven-month-old New York City section attracts enough advertisers to cover costs, he said.
“The two initiatives are among the high-profile changes Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has brought to Dow Jones since acquiring the parent of the Journal in December 2007 for $5.5 billion. WSJ. is distributed with the weekend Journal newspaper, which delivers physical copies to about 1.6 million subscribers, according to Hinton. About another 150,000 copies of the magazine are distributed with the Journal in Asia and Europe.
“‘Even given the downturn, we kept the momentum going,’ he said. ‘We put in a lot of additional spending in terms of pages, marketing and everything else, which so far is making good for us.’
“In gauging the profitability of the two projects, Dow Jones counts direct expenses such as dedicated staff, though not costs associated with contributions from other journalists at the Wall Street Journal, the company said. The magazine and section also don’t pay separate distribution costs since they are delivered with the Journal.”
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