…And we’re not talking about Tribune Chief Executive Sam Zell. We Mean Coleen Davison, private citizen, and resident of Chicago, Illinois.

The Wall Street Journal turned a letter from Davison, a former Chicago Tribune subscriber, into an advertisement — that it tried to run in the Trib. Trouble is, that paper declined to run the ad. Now, it’s running in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Trib’s rival.

Here’s some of her letter:

Our growing discontent with the Tribune’s diminishing quality became intolerable after their redesign last fall, and led us to explore other news options. We settled on the WSJ after perusing several different newspapers, even though neither my husband nor I are particularly involved in the financial world. … While the focus is obviously on the business sector, there is so much to be gleaned about our world from your reporting. Your journalists/contributors clearly know their subjects. Articles are presented articulately and coherently. Your coverage of world news and your human interest pieces are insightful, engaging and thought provoking. And I LOVE your editorial pages-just when I had begun to think common sense was a lost art, I’ve discovered the WSJ!

The ad then offers readers two free weeks of the Journal, along with a 75 percent discount.

A Chicago Tribune spokeswoman declined to comment on the ad. I asked Sun-Times spokeswoman Tammy Chase what she thought about the paper agreeing to run an ad knocking its competitor, but not even mentioning the Sun-Times as an option. She said it’s a business transaction, but in the spirit of good business, asked us to deliver this message to Ms. Davison:

As for her choice of newspaper, the Wall Street Journal is an excellent paper. Sure, we’d love to have her as a customer and if she wants to get local news from Chicago’s best daily newspaper, she can call the Chicago Sun-Times anytime at (888) 848-4637 and we’d be happy to get her a subscription set up.

You might think that the Tribune is getting beaten up here. But not to worry — its parent company gets paid by the Journal to print its Midwest edition. Tribune also publishes prints (you know what we meant)Barron’s, which WSJ parent Dow Jones & Co owns. So it seems like everybody wins in the Windy City.

News Corp President and Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin’s perks after he leaves News Corp at the end of June are basic compared with some legendary golden parachutes, though they’re still worth more money than I make in a year. Or 10 years for that matter.

In addition to his Fox studios production deal, Chernin’s creature comforts include 50 hours on News Corp’s jet ($1.65 million value), corporate car ($210,000 value) and possibly personal secretary services ($1.05 million value). See the proxy statement for more details.

That might not send the image of a cost-cutting corporate culture at a time when News Corp’s stock is down 70 percent and the bottom looks further away as its most can-do executive quits. Then again, maybe Chernin’s doing the right thing, all things considered. Check out this little-noticed excerpt from Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch’s memo to employees:

Achieving our ambitions will require change and renewal. So throughout 2009, I will continue to work closely with all of our companies to make sure that we are organized and resourced in the best way to take advantage of this extraordinary point in time. We will press our advantages and invest in our great franchises. And, of course, we will keep our eyes on big prizes, some of which may arise only once in a generation. [Emphasis ours -- ed.]

Wait a minute. Didn’t he already do that with The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones? What’s it going to be next? Michael Wolff, who wrote the Murdoch tome “The Man Who Owns the News,” published late last year, thinks that Murdoch has it bad for The New York Times. Of course, the Times’s ruling family, led by Arthur Sulzberger Jr, has said the company and its legendary paper are not for sale.

But then again, it’s a generational issue — just like the word Murdoch uses in his memo. Younger Sulzbergers can’t be that happy that the TImes suspended the dividend that some of them depend on. Could they put enough pressure on their elders to sell? Maybe they could if Murdoch decided that some of his $5 billion would be money well spent on enticing the family with a larger-than-life offer, just like the Times. He said he’s not interested in becoming more of a “public enemy” by chasing the paper, but even media moguls are allowed to change their minds.

With investors in News Corp getting more annoyed for Murdoch’s attachment to newspapers (including the New York Post where he just axed longtime gossip columnist Liz Smith), it’s easy to imagine that Chernin — News Corp’s ambassador to Wall Street — might not be able to defend one more once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

One thing’s for sure: Just thinking about this keeps a media reporter up at night.

(Photo: Murdoch on the left, Chernin on the right. Reuters)

For those Apple iPhone devotees out there, this may fall in the category of “duh,” but let’s just make it official: apps are popular. The company said Friday 300 million apps have been downloaded from its App Store, which only opened for business in July.

And it was Just a little while ago, on Oct. 21, that Apple reported 200 million app downloads, so iPhone users have been very busy since then.

App developers have also been busy, it seems. The App Store now offers many, many offerings - many useful, some just for yuks. The app count has pushed past the 10,000 mark, up from 5,500 in October and 500 in July.

Apps, for the uninitiated, are programs that can be downloaded onto an iPhone at the touch of a finger. They run the gamut of categories, from games to music to social networking to news. Most are offered by third-party developers, some for free and some for a fee.

Apple, always looking to be different, didn’t put out a press release announcing its app success. Instead it bought full-page add in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

We and the rest of the media world that covered News Corp and Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones & Co had no shortage of reporters at The Wall Street Journal telling us how bad life was going to get. Among the complaints was the paper's increasing focus on politics and non-business news. Wasn't this "diluting the brand" as they say in mediaspeak?

Not so, according to Robert Thomson, the former Times of London editor who now edits the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. Business news now is concentrated in the B section of the paper (B for Business, yes, it works.), and Journal reporters are not only with the program, they're showing a willingness to try things differently.

"It's been fascinating. There was a presumption that people would be unwilling to change," Thomson told us at the Reuters Media Summit. "There has been an innate enthusiasm to develop the paper, particularly to develop the relationship between the paper, WSJ.com, Dow Jones Newswires and Marketwatch."

It's also a good attitude to take when nearly every other news outlet you might work for is cutting jobs.

(Photo: Reuters)

Can you tell it’s book-flacking time?

Vanity Fair is running the second excerpt from the forthcoming book that Michael Wolff wrote about News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch (this one centers on his family), and Wolff is making the rounds this week to talk about it. He was on CNBC moments ago, engaging in everyone’s favorite media parlor game: Parsing Murdoch’s every move like a multi-clause sentence. Friday’s appearance follows a panel discussion at a PaidContent.org conference earlier this week where he made similar remarks. Here’s what he said on CNBC.

What will Murdoch do after buying The Wall Street Journal? What’s his next move?

“I’m not sure that he exactly knows. One of the problems here is that he bought a newspaper and not only did he buy a newspaper, but if he had only waited six months to buy that newspaper he would have saved a billion and a half dollars.” (Nothing like hindsight, is there?)

What will he buy? What will he sell?

“I don’t think that he’ll do either in the short term. I think in the short term they’ll try to manage their businesses the best way they know how.”

Does Rupert care that his stock is down?

“Does he care? No! Do the people around him care? The people holding stock options? Well, let me put it this way. Having spent a lot of time around that building, I have heard people at the highest echelons of that company complaining deeply about the price of News Corp shares.”

Was buying the Journal a mistake?

“I don’t think it’s a mistake for Rupert. I think it’s actually the crowning glory for Rupert. Is it a business mistake? Of course it’s a business mistake. It’s a newspaper!”

Who will run News Corp after Murdoch dies?

“I think we know who it’s going to be. His four adult children are going to be very clearly holding the reins.
James will be the CEO. … It depends on when Rupert departs this vale of tears. Is james ready to be the CEO? … Rupert wants all his children as close to him as they can possibly be but there’s no question at this point that the heir apparent is James.”

Would News Corp buy CBS? Its stock is falling like a rock.

“Somebody is going to buy CBS. Is it going to be News Corp? My bet would probably be Time Warner as the buyer for CBS.”

(Photo: Reuters)

Business news analysis service Breakingviews.com isn’t doing too shabbily since getting the boot from its longtime space in The Wall Street Journal. Not long after that happened, it wound up in The New York Times and its sister paper the International Herald Tribune, as well as the Daily Telegraph. (And occasionally it shows up in the Journal through the miracle of advertising.)

Now it’s scoping out Time Warner territory. Breakingviews plans to announce on Thursday that it has strucka deal to appear in Fortune magazine starting Oct. 27, while selected “views” will run on the Internet at CNNMoney.com, which includes Fortune’s online material. In addition, Breakvingviews staffers will join the CNNMoney video line-up in the near future.

Breakingviews, which jostles with The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street and Financial Times’s Lex column to analyze business news for investors and other market types, has 27 columnists based in London, New York, Paris, Washington, Madrid and San Francisco, according to the press release.

The contract lasts for one year.

(Photo: Reuters)

When the markets go south and most people are losing, it’s safe to say that there are some others who are winning, or at least spotting opportunities. You could say that about the Financial Times and its chief executive, John Ridding, who is finding a business angle on what they say about the editor’s decision-making process: “If it bleeds, it leads.”The London-based FT is building up a pretty good head of steam, particularly in the United States, as the effects of the financial crisis ooze into yet more corners of Wall Street and Main Street (sick of the “streets” cliche yet?). Here’s evidence, some of which Ridding gave me when we had breakfast at Michael’s last week:

• Newsstand sales rose 30 percent in the United States in September, and about 20 percent in Europe and Asia. That’s compared to August 2008, i.e., it’s a “sequential” gain rather than year-over-year growth. In the United Kingdom, Ridding said, “We basically couldn’t print enough copies and retailers were running out.”
• The number of registered users of FT.com rose to 750,000 now, compared with 30,000 a year ago. Some of this growth of course, came from pulling back the curtain last November. But Ridding said a couple hundred thousand of those showed up in the past few months, as the mortgage and housing crisis in the United States deepened and then metastasized into full-blown world-market-crisis mode. (Here’s how registration and subscription works at FT.com)
• During one week, Ridding noted, page views hit 25 million, more than double the normal amount. Ridding’s conclusion: “What [the crisis] is doing for our readership and audience is pretty remarkable. I think it really underlines this idea that at a time of turmoil, people really do need trusted guides, and are prepared to pay.” (The Journal, if anyone’s wondering, logged 21.7 million visitors at its website, up 110 percent from last year. It’s hard to tell whether the figure is comparable.)
• During the week of Sept. 22, online page views were up 300 percent, and monthly unique visitors were up 250 percent compared with last year. The United States is pitching in so far, producing the largest number of unique users.

That’s all very good, but reader interest tends to spike during news events, and ebb afterward. Ridding suggested ways to retain the newcomers:Stick to paid subscriptions. Ridding noted that many readers have stuck with the paper through its newsstand sale price increases, and plenty of folks are willing to pay for not only the FT, but access to the Lex column too.

• Do more video. People apparently like it as it’s resulting in more than a million views a month, Ridding said.
• Get the paper on more formats. Press hard for online subscriptions as much as print ones. Get it on the Amazon Kindle electronic book reader. Use RSS and other tools — whatever it takes to get it out there.
• Push online use as much as print. Ridding was proud to say that the FT’s dependence on print advertising has fallen to 42 percent, an important point to keep in mind as print newspaper advertising dries up. And don’t get worried about the idea that online use will “cannibalize” print sales, Ridding said. “The idea of online cannibalizing print is not just wrong, it’s the opposite. It’s proving to be a very effective marketing tool for the newspaper.”

None of this should indicate that the FT has figured out something that the rest of the world has missed, he noted. “No one has necessarily nailed the business model in media, but we feel that we’ve got a pretty strong vision and operation.”

(Photo: Reuters)

The Wall Street Journal recently stopped carrying the Breakingviews business analysis column in favor of its expanded in-house Heard on the Street column, but Breakingviews still managed to crash the party in Wednesday’s paper. In true merry-prankster mode, the Breakingviews ad urges readers of Heard on the Street to think about what they’re missing and how to get a new fix. What the ad doesn’t mention is that The New York Times picked up Breakingviews for its business section just after the WSJ dropped it. Such a move would be a real paper cut.

Esquire magazine is running a Q&A with News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch, in which in the international media tycoon talks about his upbringing, what makes Murdoch Murdoch, his new crown jewel The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and a host of other subjects. Without further ado (warning: look out for some inappropriate language):

Murdoch on his political ideology and the crisis blowing through multiple financial institutions:

I’m not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian. After this financial crisis, there are going to be some restrictions. I’m frightened they’ll go too far, but certainly there should be something.

On News Corp’s MySpace social network and competitor Facebook:

When we bought MySpace, we thought it had great possibilities. We didn’t realize it would grow as fast as it has, and of course it has given birth to imitators, which I guess they’re calling Web 3.0, or whatever, and given rise to what you’d call social networking.

We got a big wake-up call from Facebook last year. We put a lot of new things in this year. You can’t write off MySpace. It is a genuine social network where people go to look for friends, to make friends, to look for people with common interests. Facebook — I don’t want to put it down. It does interesting things and has some very able people there, but it is fundamentally a sort of directory. It’s opened up recently to let people bring in new applications. A huge number have tried to do this, but not that many have succeeded.

On The Wall Street Journal:

It’s bullshit to say we’re going to dumb down The Wall Street Journal. We didn’t dumb down the London Times — we made the London Times.The Sunday Times, too. Are they a little more popular than they were? Yes. They are populist papers. You’ve got to listen to readers.

On the Fox Network’s first big TV success:

The first successful program, the one you could see registering with audiences, was Married with Children. At first I used to blanch at it. But in the end, I realized that it was a genuinely funny, satirical program.

On immigration into the United States and speaking English:

I’m totally pro-immigration, though it would be nice if you could pick and choose your immigrants. I haven’t made up my mind about this, but I rather like the idea that you don’t get citizenship until you can speak English. You still want to have a homogeneous society. People who don’t speak English, now and for a long time to come, are going to be at a disadvantage.

On his public reputation:

People demonize me and think I’m more important than I am. You know, I’m a fairly normal person. I don’t lead a wild life or anything. My excitement is day-to-day work.

(Photo: Reuters)

Friday’s press release from McClatchy Corp about its new vice president for strategic initiatives includes a quote from interactive media VP Christian Hendricks that caught my eye:

It’s clear there’s a tremendous opportunity to provide local readers with a richer online experience by creating niche and vertical websites that combine our local experience and content with national brands and content… We are confident advertisers will also benefit greatly from better targeted advertising opportunities and increased traffic in topic-specific content areas on these sites.

By now you’ve realized that it was “niche and vertical websites” that got me all excited. Normally I find ways to translate that kind of jargon into English, but not this time.

It must have been nearly two years ago that former Wall Street Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz started talking about “verticals” — websites and other vehicles that present news geared toward a narrowed audience as a way of attracting advertising dollars because the advertiser would know that a bunch of lawyers, say, would read the law vertical that a news organization creates. The New York Times is trying something similar with its business news section, and Gannett is doing this with “mom” websites.

And now, apparently, so is McClatchy. Newspaper publishers tend to pick up each others’ catchphrases about what they’re doing to save themselves as advertising revenue dries up, and they often try to shape the story of their fortunes in similar ways until they’re forced to retreat and find a new way to explain how they will survive. Until now, however, I hadn’t heard any of them aside from the Journal and the Times use the term “vertical.”

What about all you newspaper employees and consultants out there? Is “vertical” the new buzzword among U.S. local newspaper publishers? Will verticals help save the business? Or is this latest word born horizontal?