WSJ and NYT in Ad War

Rupert Murdoch is playing hardball with The New York Times. On April 26, The Wall Street Journal launches its special New York edition, which is meant to challenge the Times' supremacy in local news. Murdoch is wooing advertisers by reportedly offering 79 percent to 83 percent discounts on full-page ads in the Journal and the New York Post. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade argues that such an aggressive move is hypocritical given Murdoch's much-shouted belief that news content shouldn't be free because journalism costs money. As Greenslade points out, "yet giving ad space away for virtually nothing, thereby sacrificing revenue to fund journalism, is supposedly ok--as long as it undermines the capability of an opposition that does spend money on journalism."