New WSJ ME Brauchli rallies the troops

There is a changing of the guard at the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday as managing editor Paul Steiger steps down after being at the helm since 1991 and is replaced by new ME Marcus Brauchli. Steiger will be an editor at large until the end of the year.

In a memo to the staff, posted on the Romenesko site, Brauchli discussed what’s ahead for the business newspaper.

He wrote, in part: “You are the best reporters and editors in the business. You go wherever the stories take you, not simply Wall Street, Washington and Silicon Valley, but to the streets of Baghdad, the office towers of Tokyo and Beijing, the farms of Iowa and the megacities of Latin America. We must ensure that you have the authority to decide on the stories that matter most, and that you are empowered to pursue stories with the broadest reach. We must ensure that our desks are efficiently organized, so they can make timely decisions to keep our coverage competitive.

“For our journalism to have the impact it should, we must reach our audience wherever and however we can. This will entail evolution in many practices here — except in the central practice, how we report and edit stories. The Journal is defined not by the way it is delivered — we are no long merely a newspaper — but by its analytic, factual, clear approach to news, whether in newsprint or on glossy paper, online or on a mobile phone, in the U.S. or abroad, in English or in other languages. There will be an accelerated melding of our print and online news operations, along with training where necessary, to ensure we can bring the Journal to readers wherever, whenever and however they want it. This is the Information Age, and it is our era.”

“Finally, I want to acknowledge the anxiety many people feel over the future of the Journal and Dow Jones. I’m not qualified or prescient enough to tell you what’s going to happen with the News Corp. offer. But I do know that a big part of what makes Dow Jones such an attractive prize is us. All of us who work here make this great institution what it is.”