14 DAY TRIAL // Monday came with an announcement from CNBC and "The New York Times" that they would start sharing business, technology and financial news and video. This comes as a response to the surge of competition coming from the News Corp, which has recently purchased Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of "The Wall Street Journal", and has just launched the Fox Business Network cable channel.
It's a win-win situation for the two, as "The NY Times" will receive video and other online features from CNBC.com, while the latter will receive access to business and economics coverage from the newspaper and from the website, NYTimes.com. And all that without any money being paid from either of the two, according to "The New York Times" spokeswoman Diane McNulty. Unfortunately, no further details were disclosed as to how long the agreement would be in effect or other joint projects that might be launched.
This is THE move (not just a smart move) to counter Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., because of the previous entry into the cable news industry (the Fox News Channel) that eventually outranked its competitor, CNN, a likely scenario to happen again with the latest product of the Corp., the Fox Business Channel. And here is a tricky bit, the recently purchased Dow Jones is still under contract to provide CNBC with business news until 2012, but it doesn't cover other news areas.
Furthermore, Dow Jones has now a lot more financial resources than it would have had as a standalone company and, thus, being in the position to pose a much more serious threat to "The NYTimes". And that's not all, Murdoch is thinking of taking over the newspaper's advertisers and, if possible, its readers, and to get rid of the paid subscriptions program going on in an attempt to boost traffic and revenue from advertising.