There has been plenty of excited coverage of the playground spat between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times started by the Journal’s move into general interest metro coverage. The Journal’s news section, Greater New York, launched yesterday, and the Times war committee responded quickly with a memo to subscribers reminding them just how great the paper’s New York section is, and has been for so much longer than the Journal’s johnny-come-lately.

Harold Evans has taken up a ring-side seat at the Daily Beast to take score as the bout progresses over the week.

So far the whole thing seems, unsurprisingly, to have revolved about print, but Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk claims the war is “really about digital”.

The spat appears to be about local New York coverage, but really, it’s about both organizations’ digital future (…) By cutting ad rates and suddenly going after the same non-financial local stories as the Times, Murdoch is waging a good, old-fashioned newspaper war in the traditional sense. But the spoils this time will be the hearts and minds of a digital audience faced with far more choices than consumers of print.

Full story at this link…