#Wall Street Journal will stick by Apple News: News Corp CEO

News Corp. will continue to allow tech giant Apple to disseminate its news articles through the Apple News platform because the arrangement is helping introduce new readers to The Wall Street Journal, CEO Robert Thomson said.

Thomson said Apple News is connecting new readers to WSJ, ­including women and young people who might not otherwise be aware of its breadth of news coverage ­beyond business news.

“That Apple News partnership allows us to focus on that tier of content and bring in a significantly new audience that we would hope to graduate to a paid WSJ subscription over time,” Thomson said in an earnings call last week. “And it is a genuinely different audience. It’s actually, of late, more women than men. For The Wall Street Journal ­itself, it’s more men than women.”

The New York Times in June pulled its content from Apple News because, NYT said, the service prevents readers from jumping to its site — keeping them instead inside Apple’s product.

Thomson also said News Corp., which publishes the Journal, the New York Post, the Times of London and The Australian among other papers, is deep in negotiations with online-content distributors beyond Facebook and Apple to pay for the content they use to drive traffic and revenue to their sites.

“What’s public is the deal we have with Facebook, the deal we have with Apple,” Thomson said. “And it’s also fair to say that negotiations are ongoing with other companies and other regions.”

He declined to name the platform companies that he is in talks with, but a slew of news media organizations, including New Corp., have recently complained to Justice Department officials about Google’s dominance over the struggling news industry, including by using its position as the nation’s dominant search engine to force publishers into unfair agreements.

“I can’t go into detail at the moment because we’re in the midst of them. But when you combine these deals, they are having a significant impact on our revenue and our profitability.” said Thomson. “And it’s frankly true for all media companies.”