Back in the summer of 2007, when the world was a cartoon version of today and Dow Jones & Co. was just a steaming leg of lamb in News Corp.’s thought balloon, media writers and other philosophers, including The Audit, were atwitter about the implications of the snapping, snarling owner of the Sunday Tasmanian taking control of the world’s leading monitor of corporate behavior, financial markets, and the economy.
Sophisticates—Jon Fine of BusinessWeek, Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair—argued that it didn’t matter, or that it was a good thing, or, anyway, what can you do, everything happens for a reason.
Fine:
“More Groundless Journalistic Handwringing Over Murdoch and Dow Jones.”
Journalism at the Wall Street Journal level is an Ivy League profession (or it’s people who would have liked to have gone to the Ivy League), with a set of conceits about process and legitimacy and respectability. Journalism on the Murdoch level is a rougher trade, faster, more direct, less “precious” (and graduating from a crappy college isn’t a problem).
Etc., etc.
Ah, those were the days.
Conceited faux elites like myself said that the issue wasn’t the straw-man arguments made at the time—that Rupert Murdoch’s company would put Page Three Girls in the Journal or inject conservative politics into its news pages. But yes, we wept and moaned and rent our puffy shirts because we thought the journalism—in depth, well-written, investigative—would suffer. Fussy us. That’s just a process, or something, right? Anyway, what’s the difference anyway who owns what?
MORTON, Miss. — They call it “the chain,” a swift steel shackle that shuttles dead chickens down a disassembly line of hangers, skinners, gut-pullers and gizzard-cutters. The chain has been rattling at 90 birds a minute for nine hours when the woman working feverishly beside me crumples onto a pile of drumsticks. “No more,” she whimpers. [1]
It’s true I wish I was as comfortable as Wolff with rough, trade-y things, but (sniffle) I’m working on those issues, and, luckily, have a lot of support (sob). It’s just that I’m sentimental sometimes and spend a lot of time yearning for the old days, when the Journal did a lot of respectable stories about process:
The day before Chen Zixiu died, her captors again demanded that she renounce her faith in Falun Dafa. Barely conscious after repeated jolts from a cattle prod, the 58-year-old stubbornly shook her head. Enraged, the local officials ordered Ms. Chen to run barefoot in the snow. Two days of torture had left her legs bruised and her short black hair matted with pus and blood, said cellmates and other prisoners who witnessed the incident. She crawled outside, vomited and collapsed. She never regained consciousness, and died on Feb. 21. [2]
That’s kind of a process, right? State murder?
Anyway, this week pro-Murdochian sun worshippers must have been delighted—punching each other in the shoulder, hoisting boilermakers, waving NCAA brackets, etc.—over the memo (h/t: Chris Roush) issued by Mudoch’s top editor, Robert Thomson, saying that those formerly elite Journal reporters are going to have to stop work on those useless, long-form stories looking into, oh, I don’t know—U.S. tax money secretly going to Deutsche Bank, one-time banker to the Third Reich—and will be judged, “in significant part,” on the amount of news they can break for Dow Jones Newswires, which, apparently, has been losing ground to the better-financed competitors at Bloomberg and Reuters.
Writing for the Newswires, where the emphasis is on speed and productivity, is supposed to be very different from writing for the Journal, where the emphasis is on depth. That distinction has been blurring for years, to the detriment of the paper. Now, the process is accelerating:
Our structure must complement the needs of all Dow Jones readers and reflect the contemporary value of what is crudely called “content”. A breaking corporate, economic or political news story is of crucial value to our Newswires subscribers, who are being relentlessly wooed by less worthy competitors. Even a headstart of a few seconds is priceless for a commodities trader or a bond dealer – that same story can be repurposed for a range of different audiences, but its value diminishes with the passing of time.
It actually isn't an either/or kind of thing. Some news is appropriately delivered fast; short shelf life, changing situations, etc. Some news isn't, and still requires slow cooking rather than a fast dip in the deep fryer. Speaking as a small cog in the big machine, a small cog which has frequently waited in vain for a promised WSJ story to come down the pipeline to the sister papers: It wouldn't hurt for the WSJ to move a little more quickly on some things. It will hurt if they pick the wrong things. Knowing which is which is the difference between success and failure. But it seems clear that the dominant WSJ/Dow Jones paradigm is "slow and ponderous."
We made the shift to "urgent" two years ago, not for a wire service, but for our own Web site. It's a different animal, and there are different expectations from the users regarding breaking news stories. The users "get" iterative journalism, where you forthrightly qualify your reporting by saying things, almost literally, like "it's still developing and we'll shove more at you as fast as we figure it out." It is fulfilling, not in the same way as a crafted feature or a massively researched investigative piece, but it is worthwhile. And we still do crafted features and massively researched investigative pieces. At our small shop, they may get put on the back burner for a day if it hits the fan and we need all hands for a compelling, breaking story. But it still gets done.
Think of the goal of "urgent" as "getting a certain type of news out to people when they most urgently need to know it." As opposed to "getting any piece of crap we can out there so we can say we were first." There's an important difference, and once you actually start doing this, it quickly becomes easy to make the decisions supporting the first premise rather than the second.
Just an alternative perspective based on perhaps relevant experience.
Bill Watson
Editor
Pocono Record
Stroudburg, Pa.
#1 Posted by wjwatson, CJR on Mon 23 Mar 2009 at 07:57 PM
(sorry about anonymous post: working journalist, not at the WSJ)
As a non-WSJ reporter, I'm always amazed at the incredibly low level of output of so many of the journalists there. Even those with diary beats often produce only one piece a week, most of them no better than what appears on the wires.
I find it hard to imagine how they fill their days and avoid becoming deeply depressed about their inability to get stories into the paper.
Clearly there is more scope for quality investigative reporting if reporters have more time. But as an outsider it seems that the bulk of WSJ reporters are producing nothing particularly groundbreaking, and working far less hard than at other papers, where one or more pieces a *day*, rather than a week, is the norm.
The truly investigative reporters at the WSJ produce maybe a piece a month, which is to be expected. Presumably these guys will not be forced to write hourly updates for the newswire.
It doesn't look from outside as though there is any risk of most of the WSJ reporters turning to butter any time soon.
#2 Posted by Anonymous, CJR on Wed 25 Mar 2009 at 07:47 AM
Make your life more simple take the personal loans and everything you need.
#3 Posted by BYERS27FLORINE, CJR on Sat 27 Feb 2010 at 03:18 AM