WSJ is no longer a second read newspaper

Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab posts more of his interview with Wall Street Journal Online executive editor Alan Murray, this time about how the newspaper has changed its content under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership.

Here is an excerpt:

Alan Murray: One of the real insights that Rupert Murdoch brought to us: I’d been with The Wall Street Journal since 1983. Throughout all of that time until a year ago, I had been trained, all of us had been trained to think of the Journal as a second read. We just took it for granted that everybody read The L.A. Times or The Chicago Tribune or The New York Times, and they’d only come to us for the things we specialized in — business and finance — or for something, for particular perspective that we might have that adds to the story.

I mean, the great example I like to use is — it’s a little dated now, but when Lorena Bobbitt chopped off her husband’s member, it was a big national news story. Everybody wrote about it. The Wall Street Journal didn’t write a word. For a month, a month and a half, the name Bobbitt did not appear in The Wall Street Journal. But then, when we finally did, it was this wonderful page-one story about the microsurgeon who reattached, reattached Mr. Bobbit’s member. And that was kind of our approach. Like, we wouldn’t write — if everyone else was writing about it, we felt like we didn’t have to until we had something special to say.

Well, what Rupert Murdoch has done is come in and say, look, you’re missing a big opportunity. And, by the way, he said this a year ago, long before we had all these bankruptcies. He said, you’re missing a big opportunity. These papers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia are very weak. We should be going in there and saying to people, you don’t need this paper. We can give you everything that you need in The Wall Street Journal. And, in fact, that’s what we’re doing now, and that’s one reason why — our circulation isn’t skyrocketing, but it is inching up at a time when everybody else in plummeting. So I think it’s pretty significant.

Read more here.