News Corp., the media company controlled by Rupert Murdoch, expects to save $100 million after its acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. and might scrap the fee for reading The Wall Street Journal’s website.
“We’ve identified low- hanging fruit,” Murdoch said at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. conference in New York, without elaborating on his strategy to reduce costs. “The thirst for financial information has never been like this before.”
News Corp., which agreed to buy Dow Jones for $5.2 billion in August, plans to use The Journal to attract viewers to its Fox Business Network after the cable channel starts next month and draw users to its websites.
Ending the subscription charge for The Journal online would be the latest sign newspaper publishers are relying more on advertising revenue than paying users.
A free website is “something right on the front burner,” Murdoch said. “We’ll have a lot of work to do on it – everything from 24-hour financial news for everybody to news customized by industry and company.”
New York Times Co. said Monday it will eliminate a $49.95 annual charge to read columnists and access archives online in a bid to attract users and advertisers.
Murdoch said earlier this year he plans to take on The New York Times by expanding The Journal’s nonbusiness coverage and investing in its divisions overseas. The Dow Jones transaction will probably close in two months, News Corp. said Monday.
News Corp.’s Fox Business Network will compete with General Electric Co.’s CNBC.
“CNBC dwells too much on failures, politics,” Murdoch said. Fox will focus on innovation, success stories and moneymakers, he said.
