Next they'll ask for overtime

Irin Carmon of Women’s Wear Daily writes Monday that some Wall Street Journal reporters and editors got to play themselves in a photoshoot recently.

Carmon writes, “Anyone worried Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of The Wall Street Journal would be the tabloidization of the paper could have seen their fears dramatized on the steps of a Centre Street courthouse in Manhattan recently: a handful of Journal editors and reporters crowded outside the courthouse, clutching cameras and clamoring around glamorous figures.

“But this was no aping of say — The New York Post or Fox News — it was a photo shoot by Michel Comte for WSJ., the glossy magazine being launched in September, which had recruited Journal staff to be extras in the shoot. For a newspaper staff more accustomed to stipple portraits than high-gloss chic, it was an apt reach across the aisle. (A spokeswoman for the Journal declined to discuss the shoot, except to confirm WSJ. had worked with Comte.) One person on the shoot said a non-Journal extra had brought a copy of The New York Times as a prop, but for a shot where newspapers were thrown into the frame, a copy of the Journal Weekend Edition was hastily switched in.”

Read more here.Â