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The End of The Journal As We Know It?
June 19th, 2008

For all the dread that media baron Rupert Murdoch instills in the hearts of serious journalists, his conquest over the Wall Street Journal may very well be the paper’s last hope – but this triumph could come at the expense of the storied broadsheet’s identity, writes Mark Bowden in The Atlantic Monthly.

Murdoch’s expansion efforts at the Journal represent a glimmer of hope for a paper rooted in the dark landscape of dead tree media, he argues in a fashionable 6,500 word piece. While other newspapers are scaling back, the Australian born businessman is embarking on “an old-fashioned newspaper battle” with the New York Times for the leadership position in daily international news. But what does that mean for the Journal as we know it?

The Journal was “was defiantly dull and predictable.” Bowden describes it. “Its uniform gray vertical columns suggested the pinstripes on a bankers worsted suit. In its use of small line drawings instead of photographs, in its refusal to chase the same stories as everyone else, in its quirkiness and uncompromising complexity, The Journal broadcast its refusal to pander to readers.”

But Murdoch “has never embraced the religion of modern American journalism.” And now he owns over a century of cultivated identity in the form of the Journal, all of which he sees as “pretense,” says Bowden.

To become king of the hill, Murdoch may toss all this aside and join the well-beaten-path of the rat race. Sure, he’ll expand coverage, the author writes, but that coverage will be of the same vein as all the other paper’s out there. While the Journal once chartered its own course and tracked down new storylines (”zigging when everyone else zagged”), Murdoch wants the paper to scoop others on the same stories.

As a measure of where the paper is headed, Bowden points to the What’s News column on the front page. The column, he notes, “formerly offered simply an executive briefing of the days business and general news and effectively advertised The Journals nonchalance about mainstream preoccupations, today has become a table of contents, each item referencing by page number a fuller story inside.”

By Mike Muller on June 19, 2008, 4:49 pm
In category: Economy | 1 Comment »

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One Response to “The End of The Journal As We Know It?”

  1. Arthur Springer Says:
    June 23rd, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    It is difficult to tell who is the greater enemy: Murdoch or Bowden. Bowden is defiantly superficial.

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