Thomson: WSJ is still a business newspaper

John Koblin of the New York Observer covered Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson‘s remarks Friday at the South Asian Journalists Association annual meeting, where he said that the Journal would remain a business paper despite wanting to become more competitive with the New York Times.

Koblin wrote, “Here’s Mr. Thomson on various other topics:

The future of the paper: “The print version of The Journal is going to be around for a very, very long time. The doomsdayers are just wrong, completely wrong. Our sales are increasing and they’re only increasing because of the reason you mentioned–serious political coverage, serious international coverage, serious science and health coverage is in decline. There just aren’t as many specialist journalists writing about those things in newspapers. There’s an opportunity here.â€?

On Rupert Murdoch: “Rupert is passionate about newspapers, he’s passionate about news. What we are experiencing at The Wall Street Journal is the articulation of that passion. He supports the editorial expansion that we’re doing; he supports the building out of the Dow Jones wire services. That’s because he believes in newspapers, he believes in journalism and he believes in The Wall Street Journal.”

The length of stories: “You all have to ask yourselves how much of the paper do you actually read each morning? Really? Do you read all of it? A third of it it? A quarter of it? How many times do you put something aside and say, I’ll really get back to that. And how many times do you actually go back to it? That’s a hard question for a journalist to ask himself or herself. But it’s a question we must ask now.â€?

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