Categories: OLD Media Moves

Readers: Journal has gotten worse

Jeff Bercovici of Conde Nast Portfolio asked readers earlier this week if The Wall Street Journal has gotten better or worse under News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch‘s ownership, and 44 percent responded with a decline in quality, while 29 percent said it had gotten better.

Anotehr 25 percent said they haven’t noticed any change. Bercovici also asked media experts what they thought.

He writes, “Ad Age media critic Simon Dumenco has also been digging the Journal lately, although he’s not sure who deserves the credit. ‘It could be that ‘the good stuff’ is just coming into greater relief lately because the end of primary season has freed up Page One. But it could also be that Robert Thomson actually knows what the hell he’s doing — and Rupert Murdoch does too, in having put Thomson in charge.’

“New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, who won a Mirror Award this week for his coverage of Murdoch’s courtship of Dow Jones, says it’s too early for judgment. ‘Some things are better,’ he says. ‘That three-part series they did on Bear Stearns was a fabulous piece of work, and certainly was not a reflection of shorter stories or fewer editors.’

“But, he adds, ‘in some ways you wonder. When you switch to more heavily international news, more heavily political news, is there a danger you’ll alienate your core business constituency?'”

View Comments

Ted Craig says:
June 26, 2008 at 4:19 pm
I would take this with a boulder of salt. Anybody who reads Jeff Bercovici's blog is going to bash anything Rupert Murdoch does as a matter of principle.
Dan Mitchell says:
June 30, 2008 at 3:12 pm
There are a couple of big problems with this post.
The headline here doesn't match up with what is written. 44 percent is less than half. The other 66 percent either believes the Journal is better or that there has been no change in quality.
But worse, the numbers are essentially meaningless. Drawing conclusions of any kind from an online poll of one writer's readership is pretty much the opposite of journalism. Especially when you give hard numbers like this, which makes it seem credible in a way that it is not.
Dan Mitchell says:
June 30, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Pardon the 66 percent business in my post. Even what I meant to type, 56, would have been wrong. But the point still stands.