Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Life under Rupert Murdoch at the WSJ

It is a year since Rupert Murdoch took control of the Wall Street Journal.

At the time it was,at least in some quarters seen as the end of financial reporting as we knew it.

The Columbia Journalism review has taken a look at the journal in its latest magazine and has discovered that

It’s clear from conversations with reporters on a range of beats, throughout the newsroom, that the emphasis on breaking news, coupled with the shrinking space for stories, means the paper is less committed to this sort of journalism. “We’re getting down to four hundred/five hundred words,” says one reporter. “You can barely introduce what you’re talking about. What’s the point?” Within a week in March 2007, the Journal published a dozen stories over two thousand words in the front section; within the same week in March 2009, only three stories exceeded that length.


However its readership is growing no doubt in part as a response to the financial meltdown of the past year and its policy of discounting.

There now appears more of an emphasis on news as opposed to business news and according to Liza Featherstone,

While the Journal has excelled in some areas—its coverage of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns comes to mind—it was caught short in others, notably the aig bailout and coverage of Henry Paulson’s Treasury department. Worse, the paper has failed to explicate the big questions—what happened and why—ceding the role of authoritative explainer and investigator to,

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