I agree with Ritholtz that the “Murdoch WSJ” is significantly inferior to its predecessor in many respects. I don’t think that leaves much of an opening for the NYT, which most businessmen see as fluffy, verbose, hyperpolitical, and melodramatic (focusing on issues with a very high emotion:predictive value ratio)–or succinctly, “just a gay paper,” as I have heard more than a few times.
Murdoch’s WSJ has deteriorated in notable respects. Before Murdoch, I don’t remember a single instance of a fashion show making the WSJ front page. Murdoch is going after the gay and young professional female demographic, which may or may not be lucrative. But it’s dumbing down the paper in very noticeable ways.
The NYT, in my view, will never gain much of a financial foothold. However, the WSJ risks squandering a largely captive audience to a plethora of very well-informed internet writers. Static corporate expense accounts have somewhat shielded the WSJ from the neo-Great Depression gripping the rest of the MSM. Risking that to fight over the soap-opera melodrama crowd is dumb.
If the WSJ got some credible security consultants who at least know what they’re talking about most of the time (Stratfor comes to mind) to do their political writing, then their expanded political coverage would add real value, at disproportionately low marginal cost. But that’s not what the WSJ is doing.
I agree that the WSJ is deteriorating quickly. The Weekend Journal looks like a comic book – I have to wear sunglasses to read the thing (whoops, I mean to look at the pictures). Why not get People Magazine instead – at least the pages are nice and glossy, and they have arguably more comprehensive coverage of Britney.
Up until now, the only thing that really bugged me about the paper was its strident, know-it-all, pro-immigration stance. But now with colorful fashion pictures overrunning the northern borders of Page 1, I am sending out distress signals to IBD.