Not your father’s Wall Street Journal

Joe Pompeo of Capital New York writes Thursday about how The Wall Street Journal has changed since it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. at the end of 2007.

Pompeo writes, “While its course still steers right as far as the opinion pages are concerned, the editorial integrity of the news report has remained intact. The most significant changes (masthead moves aside) have made the stories shorter, the prose more concise and, above all, the content broader and more appealing to a consumer base that reaches beyond the Journal‘s core readership of Wall Street traders and money wonks.

“The paper has managed this without much of a stoop, courting its general-interest audience by adding more coverage of national and foreign affairs outside the scope of finance, and giving these stories Page One real estate. There’s even a New York metro section that launched in 2010 as a reflection of Murdoch’s ambition to bloody The New York Times in its own backyard.

“But nowhere has the shift been more pronounced than in the metastasizing portfolio of luxury, leisure and lifestyle content that Journal executives might describe as more infectious than a Daft Punk summer jam.

“The enigmatic French dance duo’s cameo at the Innovator Awards, where tastemakers like David Chang, Pharrell Williams and Terry Richardson were also in attendance, was more or less the apotheosis of the Journal‘s newfound sex appeal.”

Read more here.