Wall Street Journal says revenue from print and online is up, bucking industry trend

WSJ revenue increase points to gains against NYT

NEW YORK — Revenue figures released Wednesday suggest Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is gaining ground in its newspaper battle with The New York Times.

Journal publisher Les Hinton, whom Murdoch put in charge after News Corp. took over the newspaper in 2007, outlined big quarterly gains in both print and online ad sales in a memo to the newspaper’s staff.

The increase in revenue represents a rebound from last year’s painful recession and stand in sharp contrast to forecasts for The New York Times, which the Journal is increasingly competing with. The Times and most of the rest of the newspaper business are still watching print ad dollars slip away without online ad sales making up the difference.

“They are outside the box as far as the industry goes,” said Edward Atorino, a media analyst at the Benchmark Co. Atorino said he expects most newspaper companies to show percentage declines in print advertising revenue in the mid-single digits this quarter.

Hinton said the Journal’s print ad revenue climbed 21 percent in the quarter ended Sept. 26 over the same period a year ago. Online ad sales grew 29 percent, marking the fourth consecutive quarter that both categories saw gains.

And with newsstand and subscription sales — of both print and digital editions — up 13 percent, overall revenue climbed 17 percent, Hinton said.

The gains at the Journal come as it pursues an aggressive national expansion. Under Murdoch, News Corp.’s Chairman and CEO, it has branched far beyond business and financial news with sections devoted to local and cultural coverage, positioning the newspaper as a direct rival to The Times.

The strategy is not all Murdoch’s idea. The Journal started publishing a weekend edition in 2005. And editors there had already begun to jettison the idea that it should be a “second read” to general-interest newspapers like the Times. But News Corp. has given the Journal much deeper pockets to invest in new features.

In his memo, Hinton highlighted the Journal’s newly expanded weekend edition and Greater New York, the metro section that launched earlier this year.

“All of these moves point to our desire to provide a more complete daily and weekend newspaper with business and finance at its core,” Hinton said.

The memo was first posted by the Poynter Online blog. A Wall Street Journal spokesman confirmed its authenticity.

Hinton also took a jab at the Times, including recent New York Times Co. projections pointing to an overall revenue decline of 2 percent to 3 percent for the quarter ending this month.

The Times shrugged off Hinton’s memo.

“All that we know for sure is that Mr. Hinton’s strategy of significantly discounted ads and circulation has had no effect on The Times,” Abbe Serphos, a Times spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message.

Times Co. figures are not directly comparable because its forecast includes The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune and 15 other dailies. Overall, the company is expecting a small loss for the quarter.

The Journal says it expects to be profitable this fiscal year, which ends in June 2011. But Hinton did not say whether the Journal will turn a profit in the quarter, and News Corp. generally does not break those figures out in its quarterly earnings statements.

Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the nonprofit Poynter Institute, said the Journal’s costs are likely up, with the newspaper spending more to lure subscribers.

“It’s been fairly hard to tell whether the Journal is by itself profitable and how profitable,” he said.