Robert Thomson and the WSJ

Ken Auletta of The New Yorker assesses the performance of The Wall Street Journal under the helm of managing editor Robert Thomson, whom he asserts is News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch‘s only close friend.

Auletta writes, “To attack what he labeled ‘a culture of complacency,’ Thomson lopped off fifty editorial and reporting positions, but announced that the paper and Dow Jones Newswires would hire ninety-five additional journalists.

Meanwhile, reporters at the Wall Street Journal worried that they would be pushed to make their stories more conservative. Many of the paper’s most talented reporters left for the Times, CNBC, The Economist, or Bloomberg. By 2010, staff morale had improved. Thomson made some popular decisions, such as installing Gerald Seib as the Washington bureau chief. Still, he remains somewhat remote.

“The Journal under Thomson is more readable but less distinctive. Many former Journal reporters add that the paper now has a Murdochian conservative bias. No one inside or outside the Journal offered specific instances of Murdoch and Thomson pushing a politically biased story. What occurs is a form of anticipatory censorship. If readers are offended, it’s not apparent in the numbers. In the six months ending in September, 2010, the Journal’s average weekday circulation was up two per cent.”