Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones is to launch a news app targeted at London’s City in a bid to steal the domestic readership of the Financial Times.
The mobile-only app will feature financial stories from the Times newspaper, which is part of the same News UK stable as Dow Jones, as well as the Journal and Financial News.
Perhaps surprisingly, WSJ City will be free at launch despite using content from subscription-based news services such as the Times and WSJ. Dow Jones has long championed paid-for content in a battle with companies such as Google, which dominates online advertising.
The forthcoming launch comes as further evidence that the Rupert Murdoch-owned company is focused on expanding in the British heartland of arch-rival the Financial Times, which was bought by Japan’s Nikkei in July.
William Lewis, the Dow Jones chief executive, said: “Over time, we would like to occupy the territory the FT has ceded.”
Lewis, who became chief executive 18 months ago, is one of several former FT journalists now running Murdoch’s news business in the US, including Robert Thomson, the Australian chief executive of News Corp, and Gerard Baker, the British editor of the WSJ.
In September, the WSJ relaunched as a broadsheet in Europe and Asia after a decade as a tabloid. Free copies of the newspaper, which is also offering its financial news as a digital bundle with the Times, have been handed out at major transport links over the past week as part of a major marketing drive.
The WSJ, which has 2.4 million subscribers around the world, has struggled to gain much traction outside its core US audience. The paper’s European circulation fell to 66,291 in the six months to the end of June, according to ABC figures. However, much of this distibution is in the form of bulk sales to airlines and hotels rather than retail sales.
The print circulation of the FT was 200,965 in the same period.
The City app will be similar to the What’s News app launched by Dow Jones in August. Free at launch to subscribers, digital ads are shown on What’s News after every four or five stories.
Following the separation of the Murdoch print and publishing assets from its 21st Century Fox film and television business, News Corp pulled the plug on the Daily, its money-losing iPad-only publication, in 2012.
As well as the eponymous Dow Jones Newswires, News Corp also owns Factiva, Barron’s and MarketWatch. The company employs 1,800 journalists around the world, with 320 of them in Europe.