The blog NYTPicker, in the course of praising a page one Times story yesterday, turns its critical eye on The Wall Street Journal:
Once upon a time, a great newspaper called The Wall Street Journal (not to be confused with the product currently on sale at your local newsstand) regularly published what it called “Column One” stories — pieces that put social, political and economic trends into human terms. With a combination of global reporting and multiple short profiles, the WSJ gave its readers a uniquely human dimension to a changing American society.
That WSJ is long gone, of course. Its tragically-altered front page now packages news stories and features in a conventional format and reduces stories to bare-bones accounts. The WSJ has all but abandoned its mission to offer unique human-interest journalism on important topics to an audience starved for it.
Ouch. And aside from mislabeling them “Column One”—they’re actually called leders and A-heds—all true.
NYTPicker puts this better than The Audit has, and believe me, we’ve tried.
The changes at the paper deserve a far closer look. And it would be great to see more, that is to say, some, on-the-record comments from alumni other than those employed by CJR.
Consider this a call for submissions, whether on-the-record or anonymous.
I've been tough on the Wall Street Journal for a while. My particular beef is with their coverage of the audit/accounting industry, but I stopped reading it regularly years ago when I saw fawning, PR-driven coverage of a company I knew quite a bit about at the time, Newark Electronics, a division of Premier Industrial now Premier Farnell. As Newark's accounting manager at the time, I knew the article's rah-rah tone was a load of hooey and it made me sick.
Fast forward twenty years and now I'm begging for accurate, complete, both-sides coverage of the Big 4 audit firms, not just that which gets piped in via the PR folks and the CAQ. Instead I get coverage of the firms and their relationship with their clients like AIG that reeks of status quo and spoon-fed positivity. Lest we think it's all Murdoch's fault, here's an example from early 2008 by the inimitable David Reilly. He swallows the big one and touts PwC's hard line on AIG. Well, we all know how that turned out.
http://retheauditors.com/2008/02/15/wsj-swallows-big-4-public-relations/
I do like the WSJ Law Blog, every once and a while. It's the only place in the WSJ where I can read about the audit firms fairly regularly, since there's no beat reporter for the $100 billion global industry otherwise. That is, at least the audit industry get written about when they get sued big, which is quite often lately. Oh, and there was a good investigative piece about Wal-Mart and Ernst & Young and state tax avoidance. How did that get past the pro-business, pro-audit firms screening process?
I did get quoted by WSJ recently, on the KPMG/New Century billion dollar law suit story. That was nice. But, again, the only coverage this important industry gets from the WSJ is when it blows up, massively, and then it's still fairly slanted towards the industry and begrudging any mention of what they might be doing wrong.
#1 Posted by Francine McKenna, CJR on Tue 8 Sep 2009 at 06:16 PM