NYTimes biz staff has fun with fake WSJ front page

Mary Ann Akers, who writes “The Sleuth” blog on the Washington Post website, has discovered that a staff member of the New York Times business desk made a mock front page of The Wall Street Journal to show what it would look like if owned by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Akers wrote, “Larry Ingrassia, the business editor at The Times, says one of the art directors in his department created the mocked-up WSJ front page ‘as a lark.’ Ingrassia thought it such a riot that he ordered up an electronic version and promptly pinged his friends at the Journal, where, incidentally, he worked for years before his paper let The Times steal him away.

“‘It was done as humor,’ Ingrassia told us, still giggling. ‘There was nothing nefarious.’

“And he said he didn’t get the sense that anyone at the Journal was offended. Their reaction, he thought, was ‘what a hoot.’

“Well, maybe not a full-on hoot. But even if the spoof did have them grasping for the Valium, journalists at the Journal had a few chuckles. (Just a few.)

“‘Most saw it as a good-natured (and wickedly brilliant) joke,’ says one senior Journal staffer.”

Read more here.