The WSJ power couple: Thomson and Hinton

Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org interviewed Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson and publisher Les Hinton about the changes that have been implemented at the business newspaper since it was acquired by News Corp. at the end of 2007.

Here is an excerpt:

Staci D. Kramer, co-editor, paidContent: You’ve made a lot of changes. What do you think is the most significant thing you’ve done in that time?

Robert Thomson: First of all, to improve the international coverage because America needs to know a lot more about the world, and the world about America. The initial extensive investment was in, frankly, extra pages but also in extra correspondents because unless you invest in quality journalism and make yourself distinctive you are going to lose readers. … There is more to read that’s compelling.

Les Hinton: The fortuitous thing for us is that we acquired the newspaper just before dreadful things happened to the economy and the result of that was lots of local newspaper and big regionals took pretty extreme measures to reduce and diminish their costs.

We came in with a growth mode, as Robert described, with plans to put more pages in, plans to put more correspondents in, plans to broaden the newspaper and turn it without ever diminishing its business coverage, to turn in into a newspaper that would have more broad interest.

Read more here.