This week’s edition of Advertising Age has a somewhat revealing piece concerning movements in Web media space by some old media titans. In particular, The New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal. We’ve heard the WSJ talk adventurous talk in months past about conditioning itself to compete more effectively in the general news space with the NYT. Now it’s being said that, in addition to the NYT’s attempts to draw itself further into the social realm online, the outfit is pressing to meet the WSJ in its own court: business.

Indeed, according to Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the NYT’s website, coverage will grow in the areas of “the economy, energy, small business, personal finance and enterprise technology,” all of it constructed into verticals in vein of the popular DealBook blog. This move was recently hinted at by John Markoff, a writer and reporter for the paper, while sitting as a guest on a recent episode of “Cranky Geeks,” a weekly video podcast hosted by John C. Dvorak.

I must say, this is fairly interesting information to consider. The Wall Street Journal has made known its intention to increase the value of its website’s components in the area of business, along with a general site-wide refresh scheduled for the fall season, which might help to spur its paid subscription platform further. (This despite a move by The New York Times to eliminate virtually all reader fees on the Web.)

And now that The New York Times is said to be working on delivering expanded business coverage, which one would presume will be entirely ad-supported, The New York Times is evidently leaving little to chance. Staff layoffs aside, it’s evidently working to challenge The Wall Street Journal in its primary domain. The logic seems to be, when all is said and done, to fight fire with fire.

The questions to ask now seems to be: Could this mean that WSJ.com will have to play defense against NYTimes.com? Will favored business coverage continue to fall to WSJ.com? And, reversely, will the traditional strength of varietal reporting by NYTimes.com become stretched and diminish in stature with the WSJ.com coming up closely behind?

It seems to me that both news organizations will retain some allegiance among readers. But while the generations that have lived largely with paper are replaced with the generations that rely mostly on computer-enabled information consumption, crossover will occur at an increasing rate. It’s already done so to large degree, in fact. And at this point in time, my impression is that, for WSJ.com to achieve the ends it seeks, it will have to submit to the call for free-access to its content.

That simple. On the Web it’s a numbers game. It’s a matter of who has more readers and how much they read. In that respect, NYTimes.com is the better bet right now. (Eventually, reader wealth demographics will become more and more important as well.)

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