'NYT' and CNBC Announce Web Content Sharing Deal

By: Joe Strupp and The Associated Press In what appears to be a direct reaction to News Corporation's purchase of The Wall Street Journal and its expansion with a cable business channel, The New York Times and CNBC have combined forces in a new agreement to share material on their Web sites, the Times reported Monday.

"CNBC and The New York Times have agreed to share material on their Web sites, uniting the main competitive targets of the News Corporation?s new ventures, the Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal," the Times reported today. "The deal, which takes effect Monday, will mostly involve posting Times articles and other written material on CNBC?s site, and CNBC video on the Times site, the two companies said. No money will change hands."

Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com, told the paper, ?We have agreed to be each other?s primary partners on the Web, which will strengthen both."

"The agreement deepens an existing relationship between the NBC Universal division of General Electric and The Times," the paper reported. "MSNBC and NBC already have a Web content-sharing arrangement with the newspaper.

"The News Corporation, led by Rupert Murdoch, has recently taken two big, related gambles in the United States on business news, starting its own business channel in October and buying Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of The Journal, a deal that closed last month," the Times added. "The News Corporation hopes that Fox Business will draw viewers and advertisers away from CNBC, much as its Fox News Channel took on CNN. CNBC has had little competition as the leading business news source on cable, and analysts estimate that it generates $250 million to $300 million a year in profit."

The Times noted that The Wall Street Journal has an arrangement through 2012 for its journalists to appear on CNBC that also limits their time on other channels. "But over the long run, the purchase of Dow Jones and The Journal is seen as providing a source of material, credibility and personnel for the Fox Business Network," the Times reported.

Brian Steel, CNBC vice president for public relations, told the Times that competition from News Corporation did not affect the Times deal. ?We announced a deal with Yahoo Finance a couple of weeks ago,? he told the paper. ?We?re consistently striving to partner with the best news providers in the world, regardless of what anyone else does.?

A new AP story on this follows.
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CNBC and The New York Times will share business, technology and financial news and video online as part of an agreement announced on Monday.

Both news organizations are gearing up for a surge of competition from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which is making a major push into business news with its recent purchase of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and the launch of the Fox Business Network cable channel.

The agreement calls for the Times to receive video and other online features from CNBC's Web site CNBC.com, while CNBC will get access to business and economics coverage from the Times' newspaper and Web site NYTimes.com.

New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said no money would change hands as part of the agreement. She declined to say how long the deal would be in effect or disclose other terms of the arrangement.

While the Fox business channel is still in its infancy, Murdoch's previous entry into cable news ? Fox News Channel ? eventually blew past its main competitor, Time Warner Inc.'s CNN, in the ratings. Dow Jones is still under contract to provide business news to CNBC, but that deal runs out in 2012 and doesn't cover other news areas.

As part of Murdoch's media conglomerate News Corp., Dow Jones now has far greater financial resources and global reach than it did as a stand-alone company, making it potentially a much tougher competitor to the Times.

Murdoch has said he intends to go after the Times' national readers and advertisers, and is closely considering ways to further open up the Journal's Web site to non-paying subscribers in hopes of lifting online traffic and advertising revenues. The Times recently scrapped a program that sealed off some portions of its Web site to paying subscribers.

CNBC is part of NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co. The Times is the flagship property of The New York Times Co., which also owns The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune.