Could you be any less interested in the Hewlett-Packard scandal?
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t think so. It’s still throwing precious reportorial resources into keeping this tabloid-friendly story going nearly a week after it broke.
Today it splashes an extremely boring profile of Jodie Fisher, who settled with now former CEO Mark Hurd after accusing him of sexual harrassment, on the Marketplace front, complete with a big above-the-fold picture of the former softcore-porn actress. The Journal has been flooding the zone on this story all week. But it’s really reaching now.
Reaching so far it’s tracking down Fisher’s former soft-focus love interest from a two-decade old Skinemax flick for a worthless quote:
In her first film, a 1992 erotic thriller called “Intimate Obsession,” she played a woman who was married to a rich man and had an affair with a handsome boxer. The film aired on Showtime and other cable channels, said James Quattrochi, who played the boxer in the film and is now a producer and director. “We both had aspirations of being movie stars,” he said.
They were young. They needed the money.
The “hook” for this WSJ story is that Fisher has a job in New Jersey. I am not kidding. Here’s the headline:
Far From H-P, A Job in Jersey
She now works for her mother’s staffing company. Pardon me while I wipe the sleep from my eyes:
After the H-P gigs dried up in 2009, Ms. Fisher apparently gave up her Hollywood dreams and moved with her 12-year-old son to New Jersey.
“She seemed to have a good life and take care of her son very well,” said Hayley Mortison, a close friend of Ms. Fisher’s in Los Angeles. “She wanted to go out and help her mom and learn the business with her so she decided to take that opportunity and make that change.”
Oh, please do tell me more! Wait, here it is:
At one point she managed a Los Angeles apartment complex called Belle Fontaine.Ms. Fisher was for several years married to a California man who has worked as an artist, model and chef among other pursuits, according to a person who knows his family. They divorced in 2003. Court records show Ms. Fisher received no spousal support, only household furniture and $500 a month in child support. Both she and her husband were listed as earning $2,000 a month each at the time.
Take a look at the comments on WSJ.com. They’re brutal about this Murdoch special. My favorite:
What is this, US Weekly?
Thing is: US Weekly would at least make the thing an interesting read.
Ryan,
This occurs. At
“Real Homes, Real Dow”
http://homepage.mac.com/ttsmyf/RHandRD.html
the title I use:
Serial Herd Behaviors (How Deceived Are You?)
should make these histories plenty-enough ‘tabloid-friendly’ ... without even counting the mispricings in excess of one GDP!
#1 Posted by Ed, CJR on Thu 12 Aug 2010 at 06:19 PM
Why do I suspect the dutiful, obsessively detailed, dry as dust tone is the reporter(s)' way of expressing his/her disgust for having been assigned to do this story?
#2 Posted by gyrfalcon, CJR on Fri 13 Aug 2010 at 02:05 PM
Well this was a rather predictable change that was going to come to the WSJ once Murchdoch got his hands on it. He took the respectable Times in London and turned it into a tabloid parody of a broadsheet. The owns the Sun daily in the same city and that is absolute trash.
It's no suprise he looked at business journalism and thought "how can I take this downmarket, while playing on the historical cachet of the brand?"
There are going to be A LOT more stories like this in focus at the WSJ, with a gradual reduction in the resources focused on real strategic overview of business, which in turn will be replaced by Murdoch's ideological template-based material.
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