Christine Schmidt of Nieman Lab writes about The Wall Street Journal’s decision to stop publishing on eight of its blogs.
Schmidt writes, “Wall Street Journal spokesperson Steve Severinghaus said that a total of eight verticals have been shuttered as part of the WSJ 2020 project, an internal operations review launched in October 2016. The other affected blogs are arts/culture/entertainment blog Speakeasy (last updated in March), Off Duty Daily (last updated in May 2016), breaking news hub Dispatch, sports blog The Daily Fix, and data review blog the Numbers (last updated in July 2016). ‘We’ll continue to cover these areas robustly through other storytelling formats and our digital platforms,’ Severinghaus said in an email.
“The statement sounds similar to things that New York Times staffers said around the shutdown of the City Room blog (2007–2015). ‘If it were 100 years ago, this would have lasted for 50 years, but the way technology changes and the way reader nature changes every five years now, its lifespan was just so much shorter,’ New York Times metro editor Wendell Jamieson said at the time. ‘That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an important bridge, but it’s a different industry than it was when City Room launched. It’s truly the post-blog era, and I barely had time to get into the blog era.’
“While the Wall Street Journal’s China and India bureaus and lead legal writers won’t be posting to the blogs anymore, the sites will remain live as archives. The social media accounts for the blogs will continue to be updated with relevant content from the Journal’s reporters, according to the blog posts announcing the closures. But for some followers, that’s not enough.”
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