New York Times and Wall Street Journal plan San Francisco editions

Posted by Emma Heald on September 7, 2009 at 10:59 AM

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are planning to start San Francisco editions, the NYT reported. The new editions would offer more local news for the San Francisco Bay Area in a bid to win new readers and advertisers.

Neither paper has released details of their plans, but the NYT spoke to anonymous sources about the Journal's project who explained that the SF edition would contain a page or tow of general-interest news from California, probably once a week. It anticipates starting the new edition in November or December.

The Wall Street Journal is also looking at a weekly arts and culture section focused on New York City, according to reports in July. This has been interpreted as an attempt to compete more directly with the Times, and a San Francisco edition, if it does indeed include general interest rather than business news, is likely to be viewed in the same light. The Times itself is considering regional editions based in other cities, according to the NYT article.

The NYT spoke to Dow Jones chief marketing officer Paul Bascobert who commented that San Francisco offered "a highly educated, internationally minded audience, and our research out there shows there's a market need for a quality news product." According to the NYT, national newspapers already sell better in the Bay Area than in almost any other part of the US.

However, San Francisco's biggest regional paper the San Francisco Chronicle has suffered considerably in the last year or so, and faced threats of sale or closure from parent company Hearst.

Many have expressed concern over the struggles of regional US papers which are in many cases making cutbacks in terms of staff and coverage, and pondered the possibility of 'one-paper' or even 'no-paper' towns. If national papers start to move in to regional markets, they could help to fill the gaps in this more local coverage, but it could be argued that they might also help to hasten city papers' decline. Should this therefore be a risk that they take?

Source: New York Times