Don't fret about changes at WSJ

Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer that readers and journalists shouldn’t worry about changes at the Journal under News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch because it’s been undergoing dramatic changes for the past 20 years.

Rosett wrote, “Technology is just part of the story, itself a product of that market process known as creative destruction. But in many ways technology has been both engine and emblem of the evolving business we call reporting the news.

“This sale has stirred memories of the whopping changes I’ve witnessed since walking into the Journal’s Chicago bureau in 1980 to serve a brief stint as a lowly intern.

“In those days, we banged out stories on manual typewriters, and revised them with scissors and tape (not paste). If you had an urge to communicate with people in Mali or Mongolia, you pretty much had to hope that someday you’d become a correspondent important enough that the paper would buy you a ticket.

“When the Journal posted me to its Hong Kong office in 1986, production of the Asian edition still entailed a production crew running printouts of the finished articles through a hot-wax machine and pasting them onto a big set of boards to be transformed into printing plates.Then came cable TV, the Internet, blogs, Google, YouTube, you-name-it – the vast emporium in which we can now shop for news.”

Read more here.