Dow Jones Hinton’s resignation letters
Memo to employees
Dear all,
Many of you will be aware by now that I resigned today from Dow Jones and News Corp. I attach below my resignation letter to Rupert Murdoch.
It is a deeply, deeply sad day for me.
I want you all to know the pride and pleasure I have taken working at Dow Jones for the past three-and-a-half years. I have never been with better, more dedicated people, or had more fun in a job.
News Corp under Rupert’s brilliant leadership has proved a fitting parent of Dow Jones, allowing us to invest and expand as other media companies slashed costs. This support enabled us together to strengthen the company during a brutal economic downturn, developing fine new products – not to mention one of the world’s great newspapers led by one of the world’s great editors, my dear friend and colleague Robert Thomson.
However difficult this moment is for me, I depart with the certain knowledge that we have built the momentum to take Dow Jones on to ever greater things.
WSJ defies newspaper ad trends
Newspaper publishers are still laboring to reverse a massive decline in advertising revenue – the Newspaper Association of America reported that total industry ad revenue fell 6% in Q2 — but you sure wouldn’t know it over at The Wall Street Journal.
Wall Street Journal Publisher Les Hinton sent around an email (posted on Romenesko) touting the paper’s eye-popping 17% increase in print and online ad revenue in the quarter ending September versus the same period a year ago. Print advertising jumped 21% while online ad revenue advanced 29%.
Hinton notes that this is the Journal’s fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and attributes the rise in ad revenue to the new products and sections such as Greater New York.
Meanwhile the Journal’s main competitors, USA Today and The New York Times, are not experiencing the same lift in print. In Q2, USA Today’s paid ad pages fell. The New York Times Co., which includes the flagship Boston Globe and other regional papers like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida, warned that overall print ad revenue will decline around 5% while online ad revenue is expected to rise 14%.
We’ve been keep stacks of the Greater New York edition and the checks we made find the ad count slim on some days. Our informal hoard consists mainly of sections from the summer which is a light season for advertising typically. Today’s Greater New York looks thicker with ads from the jeweler Kwiat, conEdison, sister broadcast station FOX (full page) among a smattering of others.
