Great newspaperman? See, let The Audit explain something: You don’t get to be that by owning a lot of newspapers. If that were true, whoever owned the Thomson chain would be great, and whoever heard of them? Owning several dozen Fond du Lac Reporters and Guelph Monitors just doesn’t get it done. Neither will owning a hundred New York Posts and Sunday Tasmanians.

No, great newspaper men and women got that way because they sensed a broader purpose to the enterprise and built a culture based on those beliefs, one mundane decision at a time. And when the key historical moment arrived—New York Times v. Sullivan, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, right now—they rose to the occasion. Those owners had a sense of mission, and they were willing to bet the company on it. That’s the difference between Katharine Graham and Rupert Murdoch. She doesn’t need a biographer to tell everyone she was great.

But let’s be clear: News Corp. took over the paper at a low ebb. Mediocre journalism—passionless, unimaginative, overly stylized, formulaic, timid, dull, rote—all too routinely occupied the Journal’s famous page one long before Murdoch and Thomson ever arrived. Indeed, the journalistic torpor cleared the way for News Corp. When Murdoch and Thomson arrived, they openly questioned, even mocked, what Thomson has called the staff’s “fetishization” of the Journal’s page one and long-form journalism. But how would they know what they were missing?

And in fairness to editorial management, the crisis could not have come at a worse time. Murdoch made his unsolicited bid for the Journal’s late, not-great parent, Dow Jones & Co., in the spring of 2007, catching its controlling shareholders, the feckless and unworthy Bancroft family, with their jodhpurs down, just as the crisis was unfurling. It was a full year before Murdoch had won the paper, jettisoned its not-quite-flexible-enough top editor in clear breach of signed agreements, and installed Thomson, a former Financial Times editor, to run the show.

New management came in intent on shaking up the culture, and a period of experimentation was inevitable and even desirable. It’s too bad it had to come during this past year.

Alas, News Corp.’s innovations have gone in precisely the wrong direction. Attempting to become a new New York Times has left the Journal neither fish nor fowl. And was this really the year to shift emphasis away from business news? Misguided attempts to make the Journal “newsier” has just served to elevate commodity-type business stories to multi-column headlines on page one, effectively burying the occasional gems that are being done and adding to the impression of aimlessness. Dismantling the paper’s page-one operation has cost the paper its elegance and writing advantage.

And the Journal’s white-hot pursuit of scoops is also a turn toward insiderism. Scoops are valuable—if you’re a trader. For the rest of us, not so much. But this debate was always a false choice. The Journal has always won scoops. Pushing too hard just leads to scoops that turn out to be wrong, as when the Journal revealed that Citigroup was considering firing its chairman and later splitting up the company. Both those stories were a month ago.

When it comes to Citigroup, we don’t need scoops. We need somebody to probe how it led us all here. Did you know that in 2000, nearly three of four Citi mortgages were made by a subprime unit? I didn’t think so.

Many have remarked, and I predicted, that the Journal was being made to resemble the FT. The FT is a fine little paper, just like Britain and Australia are fine little countries. But the FT’s newsgathering operation in this crisis has been irrelevant. It effectively has no investigative capability. Why, if you are The Wall Street Journal, would you want to imitate it?

Let’s take a look at the record. And yes, this will be highly selective, but I’m going to try to fairly reflect the ocean of material these outlets produce.

On September 27, the Times’s Gretchen Morgenson published a story that hit at the heart of the AIG bailout by exploring who benefited. Answer: Goldman Sachs, among others, which would gain if AIG could meet its obligations and lose if it couldn’t. Morgenson also pried loose the fact that Goldman chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, successor to the current treasury secretary, met with Fed officials on September 15, the day of the Lehman bankruptcy and a day before AIG was bailed out.

Although it was not widely known, Goldman, a Wall Street stalwart that had seemed immune to its rivals’ woes, was A.I.G.’s largest trading partner, according to six people close to the insurer who requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. A collapse of the insurer threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman’s side, several of these people said.

This story prompted strenuous denials from Goldman that it had any material interest in AIG’s fate, disputes that reached even The Audit. The Times was forced to correct an error that put Blankfein and Treasury’s Hank Paulson in the same September 15 meeting at which AIG’s fate was decided. Goldman, however, was forced to acknowledge that current and former Goldman CEOs did attend other meetings at the Fed that weekend, and that Blankfein was the only Wall Street CEO at the AIG meeting.

Point being, the Times story set the agenda for all subsequent coverage of AIG. That’s precisely the kind of journalistic courage that readers all too often take for granted.