WSJ’s Baker: We rock at scoops

Wall Street Journal managing editor Gerry Baker sent out the following email to the staff on Monday:

It’s a truism that scoops are the lifeblood of a healthy newsroom.  Without a steady stream of accurate and reliable exclusives, no news organization can survive, let alone thrive in a marketplace in which news and information proliferates at exponential rates.   For us at Dow Jones, the ability to provide high-quality scoops in areas of core importance to our subscribers – first for Newswires, then the Journal – is critical to our immediate and long-term success.  Of course, we build on our newsbreaks with the deepest and most insightful analysis in real time and in the paper, but scoops are priceless.

So it is with particular pride and gratitude that I draw your attention to the remarkable run of exclusives we have published in the last two weeks alone.

In no particular order:

• the Ackman/Valeant bid for Allergan
• the news that AT&T was talking to DirecTV
• the FCC’s proposed new net neutrality rules
• Amazon’s plans for its own delivery system
• Nike’s moves to change its supply processes in Bangladesh
• key developments in the Box and Alibaba IPOs
• Energy Future’s bankruptcy filing
• Pfizer upping its bid for AstraZeneca
• unlikely suitors for the LA Clippers
• a new Justice League movie for Warner Bros
• the travails of Barnes and Noble
• surging Iraqi oil production
• troubles for Facebook over its Oculus acquisition
• Square’s latest misstep.

This list is not exhaustive; these are just the highlights from the past couple of weeks. Many of these scoops have had large effects on markets – either on individual stock prices or on broader indexes.  In a crowded and competitive field, we made ourselves the indispensable source of news for those who needed it.  Especially gratifying is that many of these exclusives have been produced by reporting teams in areas of coverage that we have built up through the integration of Newswires and the Journal – a key objective of which was to produce specialized expertise in fields core to our subscribers.

Congratulations to all those involved in producing this great run of news stories.  We all look forward to many more.