Murdoch vs Sulzberger

The Economist dedica su Face Value a Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (foto) y se entretiene en presentar la posibilidad de que Murdoch haga a la familia propietaria del NYT la misma magia que aplicó a los Bancroft para hacerse con The Wall Street Journal. Parafraseando la última biografía de Murdoch, retoma la posibilidad de que Don Rupert ofrezca a los dueños del Times la opción de fusionar las operaciones industriales y comerciales de ambos diarios y mantener a Sulzberger al frente de la nueva compañía.

En fin. Son justos en su juicio, me parece:

Well, up to a point, Mr Murdoch. Mr Sulzberger’s problems are largely those of the newspaper industry as a whole, the business model of which has been knocked sideways by the rise of the internet. News Corp’s shares have actually fallen by more this year than those of the New York Times Company. And it is only Mr Murdoch’s diversification many years ago into television and the internet that has camouflaged what a poor financial investment it was to buy the Journal. Moreover, the Times has done a better job than almost any other paper (except perhaps the Journal) in moving online. It now boasts the most visited American newspaper website, and on November 5th, the day after the presidential election, it had an impressive 61.6m page views. Mr Sulzberger’s acquisition of About.com, a search engine, was a decent buy, though he could certainly have done more to develop it. […] Yet the harsh fact is that, his fault or not, Mr Sulzberger has yet to find a business model on the web that generates enough money to support the Times’s high-quality, but expensive, global network of reporters. He is running out of time to do so.