Content Matters

Following yesterday's announcement my thoughts began drifting towards the bizarre (Would Factiva have to be renamed Opinioniva?  Would they rename the financial index the Rupert Industrial Average?). 

To ground myself, I thought that it would be useful to read others’ thoughts on the deal.

Ken Doctor had some interesting thoughts on lessons learned and about what comes next for newspaper companies.  He points out that the two-class wall is a hurdle, not a true wall and that there are no suitable white knights waiting on the sidelines. 

Former Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine posits that the Bancrofts really had no choice.  There are no other offers, the outlook for the industry remains challenged, and maybe more to the point, there will be lawsuits if they vote down the deal.
As for other newspaper companies, she suggests that “the industry probably should be private as the returns are no longer attracting capital.”

Meanwhile, Fred Wilson sees this as an opportunity to tear down the subscription wall around the WSJ.  Rupert Murdoch should make the WSJ as free to use online as Google is. And he should do that the first day he owns the paper.
He points out that the Journal is not nearly the force in the online world that it is offline and the main reason is that you have to pay for it.  Opening up the Journal would bring it to a much wider audience and would also encourage bloggers and websites to interact with its content.  According to Fred, if the WSJ went free online, got its content into the dicussion broadly, got indexed highly in Google, and fully participated in the web in all respects, it could easily see 10mm uniques per month and 100mm pageviews within a year (which might generate as much as $100mm in revenues). That should be the goal, not to remain a niche player in online finance.