Murdoch Planning New York Section for WSJ

Last month, the Wall Street Journal launched its San Francisco edition and started mulling a Chicago one. Now, where can the financial paper with national ambitions plant its flag next?

New York, of course.

The New York Observer's John Koblin reports that Rupert Murdoch is investing $15 million in a beefed-up New York section with a possible launch of April. Koblin notes that John Seeley, formerly of the New York Sun, is overseeing the project and is actively recruiting staff. The section will reportedly cover "local politics, culture, news, and sports." (What, no Page Six?)

That this is a attack on the New York Times on its home turf is something of a given. Last year, the Times consolidated the stand-alone Metro section into the A section of the paper and folded the City section and several suburban local editions in favor of creating a combined Sunday Metro with coverage from New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester, and Long Island.

A hyperfocused New York section of the Journal (Koblin calls it "a New York Sun on steroids") could grab a lot of the local ads that might have otherwise gone in the Times.

In a 2008 profile of Murdoch in Vanity Fair, the mogul's biographer (and self-appointed gadfly) Michael Wolff wrote, "He is spending time now in consideration of an even more far-fetched fantasy, The New York Times: He’d really like to own it too. Now, everybody around him continues to tell him that buying the Times is pretty much impossible. There will be regulatory problems. The Sulzberger family would never…. And then there’s the opprobrium of public opinion…. But it’s obviously irresistible to him. I’ve watched him go through the numbers, plot out a merger with the Journal’s backroom operations, and fantasize about the staff’s quitting en masse as soon as he entered the sacred temple. It would be sweet revenge—because the Times for so long has made him the bogeyman and vulgarian."

Asked by The Street's Dan Freed if he really wanted to buy the Times, Murdoch said, "No. That's nonsense. I don't think it's for sale anyway. I haven't even thought about it. But I would imagine that it would be legally and politically almost impossible, so I'm not thinking about it."

Talk about a nondenial denial. Maybe Murdoch did dream of buying the Times once, but he has since moved on.

Then again, that doesn't mean he can't spend a few million making his own version of the paper.