Harder to manipulate business journalism

Devin Leonard, a senior writer at Fortune who covers the media, was interviewed by Foreign Policy about News Corp. CEO’s Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion offer to acquire Dow Jones & Co. and made some interesting points about business journalism and The Wall Street Journal’s future.

Here is an excerpt:

FP: A lot of people say that he took The Times of London down market—isn’t that a danger here?

DL: When I look at The Times of London, it seems as good as the quality papers in the United States. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. Plus, I think it’s harder to manipulate business news than political news. Business coverage is much more numbers driven. You have an audience that’s counting on making business decisions based on the information in the Wall Street Journal. If you’re giving them twisted or inaccurate information, they’ll cancel their subscriptions. So it would be bad for business.

FP: In 10 years’ time, will people look back on this as a watershed in the news industry?

DL: It’s possible that in 10 years people will be saying “Wow, Murdoch was so smart. When everybody else was fleeing the newspaper industry, he made big investments and they paid off.� But one of the things you have to give Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal credit for is their Web site. The Washington Post gives their content away for free; the New York Times gives most of theirs away for free, too. The Wall Street Journal has a lot of subscribers, and they’ve managed to make people pay for the product. That suggests there’s an after-print future for the publication, and I’m sure that appeals to Murdoch.

Read more here.