The evolution of the WSJ

Scott Sherman of The Nation writes in the latest issue about how The Wall Street Journal has changed under ownership by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Sherman writes, “But the wrecking ball has not come to the Journal; sleaze has not invaded its pages; the most dire fears have not been realized. Murdoch has not extinguished quality writing at the paper; he has not transformed the China coverage to benefit his business interests in China; he has not terminated the paper’s superb coverage of art, photography, music, dance and theater; he has not murdered the ‘A-hed,’ the quirky feature that has adorned Page 1 since 1941; and so on. Says Byron Calame, a deputy assistant managing editor of the Journal who went on to become public editor of the New York Times from 2005 to 2007: ‘I’m not aware of any corruption of the news standards.’

“But the Journal has changed in very significant ways. Quite a few Journal watchers — including many people who left the paper but continue to care deeply about it — are reading it with disquiet and unease. They see a newspaper whose coverage of the financial crisis, while impressive in many respects, lacks analytical rigor; a newspaper that is running shorter articles; a newspaper whose copy-editing standards have declined; and a newspaper that is abandoning a rich tradition of long-form narrative journalism.

“One picks up the Journal these days with relief and sadness — relief that the newspaper is not an amalgamation of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, Fox News and The Weekly Standard; and sadness that reporters who once wrote finely textured, emotionally affecting feature stories on a universe of subjects now produce, in too many cases, ordinary news stories. ‘Scoops’ and ‘news’ are the new Murdochian mantras, and reporters are generally expected to spend two or three weeks on a piece, not two or three months.”

Read more here.