ME of Dow Jones equities desk talks business journalism

Steve McGrath, managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires’ equities desk, talked with Gorkana about his deadlines, team and editorial philosophy.

Here is an excerpt:

What is the cross-over with the Wall Street Journal?

This is increasing all the time. In many countries the WSJ and bureau newswires are now merged into a single news team. So in Europe that already includes Brussels, Madrid and Moscow. And in other bureaus the news managers from wires and the Journal co-operate to ensure we are giving the best coverage we can to all the big stories and we are not duplicating. And it is worth noting newswire copy is very widely used in both the online and paper editions of the WSJ and therefore PRs should not differentiate between the paper and the wire because really it is one organisation.

And what if a PR has a headline stopping exclusive; would you pass on stories to the WSJ?

We let the WSJ know of anything we are doing.

One thing we do get often is some PRs agreeing to do an interview as long as we can guarantee it will go into the paper as well. And we can’t do that. But at the same time neither can reporters on the WSJ guarantee a story will appear on the Dow Jones News wire.  When a story does go out on the wires, however it will automatically go to wsj.com and all the other platforms we hit, but we can’t guarantee having it in the paper, with all the limitations in space.

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