What Kilgore's WSJ can teach media about adapting

Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, writes Monday about how Barney Kilgore‘s management of The Journal can be used today to help newspapers adapt to new media competitors.

Crovitz writes, “Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal’s once-valuable ability to report share prices.

“The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, ‘It doesn’t have to have happened yesterday to be news,’ and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page ‘What’s News – ‘ column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.

“On the morning after Pearl Harbor, other newspapers recounted the facts already known to all the day before through radio. The Journal’s page-one story instead began, ‘War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States.’ It outlined the implications for the economy, industry and commodity and financial markets.

“Kilgore led the Journal’s circulation to one million by the 1960s from 33,000 in the 1940s by adapting the newspaper to a role reflecting how people used different media for news. His rallying cry was, ‘The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading.'”

Read more here.