Praising WSJ coverage of sale of Dow Jones

Steve Coll of The New Yorker writes in the latest issue about the strong coverage in The Wall Street Journal about the sale of its parent company, Dow Jones & Co.

Coll wrote, “When there’s big news, the main story on the Wall Street Journal’s front page usually starts with a short, ringing sentence, such as the one that appeared last Wednesday: ‘A century of Bancroft-family ownership at Dow Jones & Co. is over.’ On the left side of the page that day was another signature motif: an in-depth reconstruction of how Rupert Murdoch had triumphed in his four-month campaign to buy the company and the newspaper it owned—the Journal, one of the best papers in the world.

“The story was gang-tackled by six reporters and came furnished with the Journal’s mandatory scenes of business titans with murky motives negotiating in restaurants. The writers referred to their own company’s chief executive as Murdoch’s ‘dance partner,’ and noted, on the front page, the possibility of a ‘big payday’ for the boss following the sale.

“In all, the Journal’s coverage of the sale was a kind of prideful and impressive demonstration to Murdoch of the values, the talents, and the daring of the editors and reporters he will now have on his payroll. The subliminal question that the coverage seemed to ask was, Will Murdoch destroy the Journal? Will he undermine the paper’s values and call that ‘investment’?”

Read more here.