Rupert kills the news

The previous post on "disseminating news" makes for an "interesting" juxtaposition to what is happening in New York - where Rupert Murdoch is near to cornering the newspaper world.

The Columbia Journalism Review [reproduced on AlterNet] reports:

"The abrupt resignation of Marcus Brauchli as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal is surprising even to those of us who saw News Corp.'s takeover of the Journal's parent as a journalistic disaster in the making.

The best account, as Ryan Chittum points out in our Opening Bell, is by Richard Perez-Pena in today's New York Times.

There will be some who say the resignation of an editor doesn't matter or that it is a good thing since we live in the best of all possible worlds. In fact, Brauchli's resignation is a billboard-sized sign that the world's leading financial publication is abandoning the qualities that made it great in the first place.

If Murdoch's bid for Dow Jones & Co. was the beginning of the end of the Journal as we knew it, as I wrote when the bid was unveiled a year ago, Brauchli's exit is the end of the beginning of the end."

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