How Rupert Murdoch Plans to Destroy NYT

Murdoch is going for the throat. NYT has nowhere near the street savvy to fight this battle. Unless big bucks minority owner Carlos Slim decides to throw dumb money after lost money, NYT is dead.

FT reports on Murdoch's plan:

News Corp is offering steep discounts to advertise in its Wall Street Journal and New York Post newspapers as its chairman Rupert Murdoch prepares an aggressive attack on the New York Times, people familiar with the plan said.

The sharp discounts come ahead of the April 26 launch of the Journal’s New York edition, which is aimed directly at the Times’s home turf.

The fresh assault on the Times bears the hallmarks of the strategy that has helped the News Corp chairman expand his print empire from Sydney to London to New York. Mr Murdoch has already taken on the Times editorially by boosting general news coverage.

In presentations to potential advertisers seen by the FT, News Corp appears to have offered discounts of between 79 and 83 per cent for full-page ads in the Journal and the Post.

News Corp executives are also bundling ad sales across the Journal and the Post in a new package called Journal Post +, according to the presentation.

The strategy recalls the newspaper price wars Mr Murdoch launched in the mid-1990s in the UK. The aggressive discounting by Mr Murdoch underscores the severity of his attack on the Times, US publishing executives said. “That is deepest [discount] I have heard of this year,” one media buyer said of News Corp’s strategy