In a piece in The Nation, Scott Sherman suggests that Rupert Murdoch hasn't taken a wrecking-ball to the Wall Street Journal since acquiring it. However....
"But the Journal has changed in very significant ways. Quite a few Journal watchers--including many people who left the paper but continue to care deeply about it--are reading it with disquiet and unease. They see a newspaper whose coverage of the financial crisis, while impressive in many respects, lacks analytical rigor; a newspaper that is running shorter articles; a newspaper whose copy-editing standards have declined; and a newspaper that is abandoning a rich tradition of long-form narrative journalism.
One picks up the Journal these days with relief and sadness--relief that the newspaper is not an amalgamation of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, Fox News and The Weekly Standard; and sadness that reporters who once wrote finely textured, emotionally affecting feature stories on a universe of subjects now produce, in too many cases, ordinary news stories. "Scoops" and "news" are the new Murdochian mantras, and reporters are generally expected to spend two or three weeks on a piece, not two or three months. Long-form journalism, says one reporter, is "less cherished, less savored" by the new regime led by Murdoch's handpicked editor in chief, Robert Thomson, former editor of Murdoch's Times of London. (Thomson declined to be interviewed for this article.)
"For decades the DNA of the Journal was this double helix: incredibly strong business reporting and incredibly strong narrative/analytical writing," says Joshua Prager, a long-form reporter who recently left the newspaper after almost thirteen years. "But now they've ripped one of the strands out of it: narrative writing is all but gone. As a result, the Wall Street Journal has lost its soul.""
Read the piece in full here.
"But the Journal has changed in very significant ways. Quite a few Journal watchers--including many people who left the paper but continue to care deeply about it--are reading it with disquiet and unease. They see a newspaper whose coverage of the financial crisis, while impressive in many respects, lacks analytical rigor; a newspaper that is running shorter articles; a newspaper whose copy-editing standards have declined; and a newspaper that is abandoning a rich tradition of long-form narrative journalism.
One picks up the Journal these days with relief and sadness--relief that the newspaper is not an amalgamation of the Murdoch-owned New York Post, Fox News and The Weekly Standard; and sadness that reporters who once wrote finely textured, emotionally affecting feature stories on a universe of subjects now produce, in too many cases, ordinary news stories. "Scoops" and "news" are the new Murdochian mantras, and reporters are generally expected to spend two or three weeks on a piece, not two or three months. Long-form journalism, says one reporter, is "less cherished, less savored" by the new regime led by Murdoch's handpicked editor in chief, Robert Thomson, former editor of Murdoch's Times of London. (Thomson declined to be interviewed for this article.)
"For decades the DNA of the Journal was this double helix: incredibly strong business reporting and incredibly strong narrative/analytical writing," says Joshua Prager, a long-form reporter who recently left the newspaper after almost thirteen years. "But now they've ripped one of the strands out of it: narrative writing is all but gone. As a result, the Wall Street Journal has lost its soul.""
Read the piece in full here.
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