If the Journal wants to compete with the Times as the nation’s paper of record on hard, non-business news, it’s going to have to work more like a normal newspaper and move its early deadlines back.

The best of all possible Journals

A debit for The Washington Post’s Panglossian look at the changes at the WSJ since Murdoch’s taken over. The WaPo spins an okay scoop—that the Journal will now have a sports page featuring scores from a News Corp. unit—into a section-front story that strains a bit too much.

The Post says there’s been no “overhaul” of the paper. Sure, there aren’t naked breasts on page three, but long-time readers have noticed that the paper’s front page has been transformed since Murdoch took over in December. Big changes are afoot in the paper’s habit of publishing daily “leders,”—magazine-like stories often weeks or months in the works and with no real connection to news of the day—that used to dominate the page two at a time. Now there are rarely two and sometimes none at all, and the quirky “ahed” feature is barely hanging on (though seemingly always below the fold).

The WSJ’s front page is now not much different from any other front page—that’s a major difference that the Post says “Journal reporters have noticed,” but one that it minimizes.

And the inside of the A section has become much more devoted to political news—with less space devoted to the Journal’s core business and economics coverage.

Those are major changes in content, though it is difficult for outsiders to tell whether they stem from the takeover by Murdoch or the ascension of Marcus Brauchli as managing editor, which happened a few months before. We suspect it’s both.

In any case, the Post is wrong to play down such dramatic changes.

Color us green with boredom

Another “green houses” story with a minor-at-best news hook? That’s a debit.

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