Former WSJ reporter calls for more proactive coverage

Jonathan Weil, the Wall Street Journal reporter who left the paper at the beginning of the year to go work for proxy advisor Glass, Lewis & Co., said in an interview that he did not leave the business newspaper out of dissatisfaction with the paper or with what he was writing about, but more to get closer to relatives, according to this Westword article.

But Weil also said that he thinks business journalism needs to change. The article said, “Nevertheless, he feels that journalists in general should spend more time searching for new material and less time conducting journalistic post-mortems. ‘The press needs to be a lot more skeptical,’ he says, ‘and not just repeat things without critical thinking one day, then come back two years later and discover it was all lies.’

Leslie Scism, Weil’s former editor at the Journal, said, “It’s a loss to the Journal that he’s moved on to this new job, because he’s such an original thinker. He likes finding unique angles that most reporters wouldn’t even begin to think about, and he takes pride in originality. He does not like following the pack.”