Being an online news sluggo, I like the sounds of this NYT article about online news -- mainly from the business side. It focuses on the deal for CBS MarketWatch.

An excerpt:

When L. Gordon Crovitz, the president of Dow Jones & Company's electronic publishing division, sat down last spring to assemble a three-year strategic plan, one of the things he foresaw was a potentially costly gap about to open. If the demand for online advertising continued to grow, Dow Jones's Web sites, including The Wall Street Journal Online, would not provide enough page views for all the online ads the company could sell.

"That is a wonderful problem to have," Mr. Crovitz said, "but you don't want to have that problem if you can avoid it."

Last summer, Mr. Crovitz set out to solve part of his problem by acquiring CBS MarketWatch, the financial news Web site found at cbsmarketwatch.com. The only problem: three other media giants apparently reached the same conclusion. The New York Times Company, the Gannett Company and Viacom Inc. all joined in to bid for the site. "I never thought the list of potential bidders was as long as it turned out to be," Mr. Crovitz said.

Dow Jones won the bidding with a deal, expected to be completed today, for $519 million, about six times MarketWatch's 2004 revenue. The four-way frenzy among the companies to own MarketWatch outright may be the strongest sign that news and information sites, long thought to be dot-gone relics of 1999, are making a big comeback in 2005.