Note the dig at “our journalists.” And “Speedy” (an old Dow Jones system for quickly sending stories to the wire) will now be “Urgent”:
With these objectives in mind, we are sending Speedy to the knackery and saddling up a successor, the URGENT. New nomenclature alone will not generate news, so there must also be basic changes of principle and practice at the Journal. A guide to the new system will be published next week and we are aiming to launch on April 15. In coming days, please raise any relevant issues with your bureau chief or editor. There is much angst-ridden, vacuous debate about the fate of American journalism – this is an important practical measure to secure the long-term future of journalists at Dow Jones.
It’s true. I am a little angst-ridden, but I’m going to take a calming ujjayi breath, strike a Warrior Two pose, and explain a few things:
First, Thomson needs to stop taking sophomoric digs at his staff. That’s our job.
Second, any implication that Journal writers are lolling around, not working hard enough, and don’t share Thomson’s sense of urgency about the crisis in newspapers is a joke. If they worked any harder over there there’d be nothing left but a few pools of butter on the newsroom floor.
Third, you’re talking about squeezing a toothpaste tube here. Nothing is for free. You want scoops, political news, international news, you lose something else. Cranking up the newsroom hamster-wheel is what news organizations in trouble have always done. No one has demonstrated that it works. It is also the bureaucratic response. It is easy to measure words, exclusives, stories per reporter, etc. It’s harder to measure greatness.
Fourth, Murdoch and Thomson have to get over their own conflicts and angst about the property Murdoch bought and Thomson now runs. What gave the Journal its value was, first and foremost, by a long shot, its legendary Page One. The paper’s greatness was the reason Murdoch wanted it in the first place, even while—as Wolff’s biography of Murdoch makes clear—resenting it. If Murdoch saw the value in scoops, he would have gone after Reuters. But he didn’t, did he?
Fifth, I predicted all this.
Sixth, I wonder what the old Dow Jones crowd must be thinking.
Not to mention the News Corp. director/aspiring opera singer appointed to represent the Bancroft family, Dow Jones’s former controlling shareholders who had inherited special “Class B” shares designed to help them preserve the Journal’s “independence and integrity” but sold the paper anyway.
Maybe someone should wake up Dow Jones’s “special committee” on editorial integrity, the Maytag repairmen of the media industry.
Seventh, while the staff is running around Speedy-ing things, we’ll never know what readers gave up in return for all those 200-word items about pharma industry talks and whatnot.
OAKLAND, Calif. — On the eve of the 1986 leveraged buy-out of Safeway Stores Inc., the board of directors sat down to a last supper. Peter Magowan, the boyish-looking chairman and chief executive of the world’s largest supermarket chain, rose to offer a toast to the deal that had fended off a hostile takeover by the corporate raiders Herbert and Robert Haft.
“Through your efforts, a true disaster was averted,” the 44-year-old Mr. Magowan told the other directors. By selling the publicly held company to a group headed by buy-out specialists Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and members of Safeway management, “you have saved literally thousands of jobs in our work force,” Mr. Magowan said. “All of us — employees, customers, shareholders — have a great deal to be thankful for.”
Nearly four years later, Mr. Magowan and the KKR group can indeed count their blessings. While they borrowed heavily to buy Safeway from the shareholders, last month they sold 10% of the company (but none of their own shares) back to the public — at a price that values their own collective stake at more than $800 million, more than four times their cash investment.
Employees, on the other hand, have considerably less reason to celebrate. Mr. Magowan’s toast notwithstanding, 63,000 managers and workers were cut loose from Safeway, through store sales or layoffs. While the majority were re-employed by their new store owners, this was largely at lower wages, and many thousands of Safeway people wound up either unemployed or forced into the part-time work force. A survey of former Safeway employees in Dallas found that nearly 60% still hadn’t found full-time employment more than a year after the layoff.
James White, a Safeway trucker for nearly 30 years in Dallas, was among the 60%. In 1988, he marked the one-year anniversary of his last shift at Safeway this way: First he told his wife he loved her, then he locked the bathroom door, loaded his .22-caliber hunting rifle and blew his brains out.[3]
Speedy that.
1. 9 TO NOWHERE
These Six Growth Jobs Are Dull, Dead-End, Sometimes Dangerous They Show How ’90s Trends Can Make Work Grimmer For Unskilled Workers Blues on the Chicken Line; By Tony Horwitz, December 1, 1994
2. A Deadly Exercise:
Practicing Falun Gong Was a Right, Ms. Chen Said, to Her Last Day — Cellmates Recall the Screams Of the Chinese Retiree Before She Died in Jail —`No Measures Too Excessive’; By Ian Johnson, April 20, 2000
3. “The Reckoning: Safeway LBO Yields Vast Profits But Exacts a Heavy Human Toll,” Susan Faludi, May 16, 1990.
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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.
Posted by wjwatson 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.
Posted by Anonymous on Wed 25 Mar 2009 at 07:47 AM