Wall Street Journal reporters will now play the lottery

Wall Street Journal reporters will now take several different strategies with their careers since it appears that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is likely to succeed in buying Dow Jones & Co., the parent of the paper, write Michael Calderone and Felix Gillette of the New York Observer.

They write, “Robert Block, a Journal reporter based in the Washington bureau, seemed on edge.

“Mr. Block recently wrote a piece for Media Matters, the newsletter of the Local 1096, in which he criticized Rupert Murdoch’s impact on the newspaper business in England, where Mr. Block once worked for the Sunday Times.

“‘I worked for the man,’ said Mr. Block in an interview on the evening of July 17, as Mr. Murdoch was meeting with the Dow Jones directors. ‘It was a British publication in a slightly different tradition than we have. But I see in everything he owns a certain ethos—and that is pandering to a market and using popular taste and entertainment to tell everything.… The ethos that he brings is not compatible, I think, with the ethos of why most of the people joined the Journal.’

“‘I think there will be an inevitable culture clash,’ added Mr. Block. ‘Some of my friends and colleagues are going to cross their fingers and hope for the best, some are going to leave, some of them are going to work real hard and try and find exit strategies for themselves, and many are resigned to the fact that there are market forces greater than themselves and they will sit around and hope for the best.'”

Read more here.