Categories: OLD Media Moves

New broadsheet WSJ in Europe shouldn’t worry investors

Simon Constable writes for Forbes.com about whether News Corp. investors should be worried about its decision to turn The Wall Street Journal into a broadsheet from its current tabloid format.

Constable writes, “Should Newscorp. investors be worried? Probably they should not.

“The team at the top has deep knowledge of Fleet St. WSJ editor-in-chief Gerald Baker is a veteran of The Times and the FT. His boss, Dow Jones CEO William Lewis, was editor of The Daily Telegraph. Robert Thomson, CEO of Newscorp., is a veteran of The Times, and The FT. And the big boss himself Rupert Murdoch is a newsman to the core. It was his innovation that led to The Sun Newspaper becoming the biggest circulation paper in the UK partly by tapping an audience that prior to had been thought unreachable.

“There’s another reason not to worry. To be completely fair the whole swath of papers on the newsstand isn’t direct competition. For instance, it’s doubtful that WSJ’s target reader needs to be swayed away from mass-market tabloids such as The Mirror.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.