Categories: OLD Media Moves

Murdoch: WSJ is better, but has long way to go

John Koblin of the New York Observer caught up with News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch at the Time magazine fete honoring its most 100 influential people and got the new owner of The Wall Street Journal to say that the paper is better, but “it’s got a long way to go.”

Koblin also writes, “Mr. Murdoch was with his wife, Wendi, and eventually worked his way to Paul Steiger. In the Time 100 issue itself, which adopts an Interview-magazine-like conceit of allowing subjects to be interviewed by non-reporters, Mr. Steiger, the former Wall Street Journal managing editor, is Mr. Murdoch’s interlocutor. It was not, how do you say, a hardball.

“And it didn’t go over very well inside The Journal either. Staffers weren’t too happy when Mr. Steiger took a multimillion-dollar parachute out of his job from Mr. Murdoch; imagine how they felt when they saw this interview, which was conducted ages before Mr. Murdoch dispensed with Mr. Steiger’s successor, Marcus Brauchli, but hit newsstands just as the newsroom was cooling off from that blow.

“‘I love the people [at The Journal],’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’ll stay mad at me for long.'”