Dylan Byers of Puck writes about how The Wall Street Journal’s revamped Washington coverage has upped its game against the rival New York Times.
Byers writes, “Last week, shortly after The Wall Street Journal broke the news that President Trump’s Justice Department had informed him in May that his name was in the Epstein files—a follow-up to its previous mega-scoop about the president’s (alleged) lewd birthday card illustration—journalists inside the paper started sending around a provocative meme. It featured two cartoon dragons, and essentially posited that the Journal was eating The New York Times’s lunch. ‘We’re on fire,’ one journalist there conceded when I mentioned the meme. ‘The Times was always thought of as number one,’ said another. ‘ I’m not sure you can make that case anymore.’
“The more telling response came from inside the Times, where editors and reporters readily acknowledged the Journal’s recent editorial triumphs and were quick to praise its plucky and charismatic editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, whom virtually everyone in the industry likes and admires—save, of course, for the largely somnolent bureaucrats that she evicted from the joint upon her arrival from Fleet Street a few years back. ‘They’re having a great run on Epstein, and, in general, I think Emma has succeeded in sharpening them,’ one reporter said. Another veteran Times journalist was more effusive: ‘Emma is the best editor they have had in a long time, and she knows what a juicy story is and how to get it. And they’re the most competitive I’ve ever seen. I don’t know what the [dragon] drawing of us means, but they worry us.'”
Read more here.
