Reluctantly agree: the WSJ has changed its blend of news coverage in a less interesting style. Joe Nocera of the New York Times writes:
With its new orientation toward Washington and politics, The Journal was bound to overflow with stories about the presidential race, as indeed it did. Still, what struck me about The Journal this week — what struck me hard — was how little business news the first section of the paper contained.
Every day the lead story, and the big photo, was devoted to the convention — stories that said more or less the same thing as everyone else’s. And most days, only one of the four front-page stories was devoted to business. Inside, it was even worse: pages of political and international coverage, which came at the expense of business. On Tuesday, in fact, there wasn’t a single mainstream business story in the entire first section. And the business stories that did run lacked the kind of nuance, analysis and wonderful story-telling that used to characterize The Wall Street Journal I loved.
[From The Wall Street Journal, R.I.P. – Business, Power and Deals – Executive Suite blog – NYTimes.com]
I’ve been a subscriber since 19941, give or take, with a few years off when my finances got shaky, and there is certainly less compelling content in the WSJ as of late. Maybe only a momentary glitch? Possibly, yet Murdoch does have a very strong vision for how newspapers should function, and I’m afraid the WSJ will never be the same paper.
Footnotes:But to me — and I’m speaking now not as a someone who works for a competitor but as someone who has always adored reading The Wall Street Journal — the paper he is producing is less distinctive, less interesting and less important to its core business readership. The Journal of yore always assumed that its readers knew the basic facts of a big story, so it worked hard to find new, fresh angles that required smart reporting and original thinking. The old Journal could barely bring itself to publish a quarterly earnings story without putting it in context for the reader. Most painful for me are the memories I have of the rollicking Wall Street Journal narrative that was such a staple — a behind-the-scenes story about some shenanigans inside a company that only The Journal would ferret out and tell. Nobody else in journalism wrote those stories on a regular basis, and now that The Journal has largely stopped writing them I fear they are going to disappear, like an ancient dialect that dies out.
- and still skip the editorial pages without a second thought [↩]