Two major financial dailies suffering

London's Financial Times and Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal both seem to be sailing in choppy waters as falling advertising revenues and legal problems whip up a potentially lethal storm. FT's problems are two-fold, claiming a GBP 9m overall loss last year and currently being sued for libel, a case that could result in the sale of Fleet Street's legendary pinksheet. Dow Jones reported a 54% spike in first quarter profits, a drop that some speculate could cost its boss Peter Kann his job. Dow Jones' loss is being blamed on advertising drops of 8% at the Journal, a statistic expected to continue its decline. But despite this bad news for WST, its online version is raking in readers and profits. With an annual print subscription costing four times more than a subscription to its Website, (one of the rare newspaper Websites to charge for access), readers have been ditching dead-tree for digital. It's 731,000 online readers have helped rocket its Internet profit margins to more than twenty times the print version. Market analyst Seth Feinseth said "They're simply losing market share to other media. Print publishing is not a profitable business for Dow Jones anymore." Although the company's acquisition of the online financial site MarketWatch helped to boost its Internet publishing revenue by over 35%, investors are still not certain of the move's long-term implications.

Sources: FT: Brand Republic WSJ: New York Post