On the day of FBN’s official debut, The New York Times reports, there developed a second front for competition between business networks: online advertising. Bill Carter writes that two Dow Jones & Company-owned websites, MarketWatch and WSJ.com, “filled up the exact spaces CNBC had purchased with rotating ads that included some for Fox Business Network.”
Carter says CNBC’s ad buy included “an exclusive position on MarketWatch” and a WSJ.com presence. But “in both cases, ads for Fox Business Network turned up exactly where CNBC had contracted for its ads to be. Fox’s owner, the News Corporation, agreed to purchase Dow Jones in July, but that deal has not been completed.”
Dow Jones spokesperson Robert Christie had said on Sunday the company has the right to change ad schedules. The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Tom Rosentiel says, “It does raise anew the question of whether the editorial judgment of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones journalists will remain independent of News Corp. Apparently on the ad side, it will not.”