Wall Street Journal Premieres Local NY Edition

The Wall Street Journal today unveiled its new, expanded coverage of local news in the greater New York region, where the newspaper will go head-to-head with its national news rival, the New York Times, to compete for local readership and advertising dollars. The Greater New York section features coverage of politics, real estate, sports and culture.

If the New York edition proves successful, Dow Jones executives have said they will launch more regional editions. One city mentioned is San Francisco, where the New York Times recently launched its own regional edition and the Journal produces a weekly section of its own. Reuters also reports that the Journal ramped up its distribution in Detroit when the two main dailies there, the Detroit News and the Free Press, cut home delivery of their print editions, leading to speculation that Detroit may be another local option.

It’s nice to see a metropolitan newspaper committing to expanding coverage of the local community after years of news about shrinking coverage, layoffs and bankruptcies. To be fair, others have expanded local coverage but often at the expense of national or international coverage and none as big a move as this one is for the Journal. Such initiative, investment and competition by the private sector is an example of what the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy called for when it said in its very first recommendation that media policy should be directed toward “innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.” A rich local news ecosystem with diverse sources of news and information is vital to the health of America’s communities.

Today’s premiere edition of local coverage  includes a wide variety of stories covering everything from immigration and homeland security to rats and bicycles.  In addition to the original reporting, some of the stories are sourced from Wall Street Journal blogs (”NY News from WSJ Blogs”) as well as “Stories from Around the Web.” The latter is just a tad ironic. In a speech to the Federal Trade Commission’s Workshop “From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” last December, News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch described as “theft” the business model of news aggregators who link to journalism produced by others without paying for it. Murdoch decried “those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production.”  Most ironic? A story sourced from the New York Times in the Journal’s automated feed of Stories from Around the Web.