The Audit
The Anglo-ization of The Wall Street Journal
A struggle over the editor was about much more than turf
By Dean Starkman Thu 8 May 2008 01:16 PMLAKE JACKSON, Texas — When Lisa Kelly learned she had leukemia in late 2006, her doctor advised her to seek urgent care at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. But the nonprofit hospital refused to accept Mrs. Kelly’s limited insurance. It asked for $105,000 in cash before it would admit her.Sitting in the hospital’s business office, Mrs. Kelly says she told M.D. Anderson’s representatives that she had some money to pay for treatment, but couldn’t get all the cash they asked for that day. ‘Are they going to send me home?’ she recalls thinking. ‘Am I going to die?’
Re-reading Barbara Martinez’s recent page-one story in The Wall Street Journal about a Texas woman’s Kafkaesque experience with the U.S. healthcare system, even proponents of long-form journalism can see the obstacles that story presents to a reader.
The first is the subject, the U.S. healthcare system, which we already know is screwed up. So the chance of finding a surprise in the story, that is, some news, seems scant.
The second is its length: 2,408 words, about fifty-three newspaper inches, which cover about half a page in gray type.
The third obstacle is the reader’s natural skepticism: a nonprofit hospital asks for $100,000 in cash that very day before it will admit a very sick patient. That can’t be completely right, can it?
But it can.
There has been a lot of talk recently about the replacement of one editor at The Wall Street Journal with another.
One goes, another comes. What of it?
Good coverage of the greased exit of Marcus Brauchli, including in the Journal itself, revealed that the dispute, for all its media-power-play aspects, is in the end actually an argument over journalism, of all things—more esoterically, even, over journalism forms.
Sure, there were some turf issues, but in the main Brauchli had tried—half-heartedly, it turns out—to mediate between the Journal’s tradition of longer-form, fully developed stories and demands from News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch and the publisher he appointed, Robert Thomson, for something else:
The new owners were demanding newsier stories and more general news. Mr. Thomson, who took the floor after Mr. Brauchli, noted that some Journal stories appeared to have the ‘gestation period of a llama’ (that is, nearly a year). He said ‘the New York Times and the Financial Times are the enemy, but the real enemy is time’—by which he meant the risk of wasting the reader’s time. He said stories needed to be shorter and more alluring, and warned of ‘articles unread, jumps un-jumped, wisdom untapped.’
And here is the Journal editorial rank-and-file’s reaction to Brauchli’s exit, nicely summed up by The New York Times:
The news cast a pall over the newsroom, where Mr. Brauchli is liked and respected, and his exit reinforces fears that The Journal is retreating from its focus on business and sophisticated, in-depth reporting.
And they’re right. The Journal is retreating from sophisticated, in-depth reporting.
It’s not hard to see what Murdoch and Thomson have in mind for the new Journal. A blizzard of shorter stories that don’t jump and that take no more than a day to report, with a heavy emphasis on scoops, adds up to…
John Gapper, the Financial Times’s chief business commentator, has it right: the FT itself.
He wants, in other words, to put shorter and pithier news stories on the fronts of the news sections. This is destined to cause huge uproar at the Journal because it conflicts with tradition but, to be honest, I think he is right.
This is an Anglo-Australian newspaper model—straight, wire-service-type business news coupled with extensive and often smart analysis inside.
That’s fine, except what’s lost in this scenario is what makes American newspapers distinct from and superior to their Anglo-Australian counterparts: fully developed features, investigations, and just plain original reporting—that is reporting that takes longer than a day.
These stories aren’t about deals, typically.
They do more than report what some institution did yesterday.
They don’t offer warmed-over political analysis you can get anywhere.
The American model offers—requires—the kind of reporting that won The Washington Post three of its six Pulitzer Prizes this year: investigations of deplorable conditions at Walter Reed hospital, Vice President Cheney’s behind-the-scenes influence, and unaccountable security contractors in Iraq.
Prizes aside, it is also a form that American readers across the country have understandably come to expect, indeed demand.
It is why the Charlotte Observer embarked on a massive project—yes, it took a year—exploring soaring foreclosure rates in its communities.
It’s why the Palm Beach Post spent two years—two llamas worth, by Thomson’s metric— exploring corrupt land deals involving local public officials.
It’s why the Los Angeles Times scrutinized U-Haul’s unsafe practices.
It’s just, if you are an American newspaper, what you do. For me, it’s the key part.
Read all about them on The Washington Post’s inaugural Top Ten Investigations list.
The Brauchli vs. Thomson debate, such as it was, is a version of the quality/quantity dispute that has been around newsrooms since Gutenberg. It has taken on feverish intensity lately thanks to the Internet, which has two essential attributes—it is wrecking newsprint fundamentals and it is always on, allowing (and often demanding) publication at a moment’s notice. Believe it or not, it even takes place at the Columbia Journalism Review, where, contrary to widespread belief, we do not sit around on bamboo mats clinking finger cymbals all day. That’s what administrators do.
The Thomson position—more, faster—isn’t always wrong, but in this case it is.
First, you’d think from the hysteria surrounding the debate that the Journal, like the newspaper business generally, has been bleeding circulation, hence the urgent need for change.
Quite to the contrary, actually. Despite what I and at least one other person see (1) as a period of journalistic decline over the last 10 years or so, at least on page one, subscription levels have held their own, the Audit Bureau of Circulations says:
Second, Thomson has misdiagnosed the problem.
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Michael Powell![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Thu 8 May 2008 10:56 PMWell stated.
One of the pathetic aspects of this not yet terminal newspaper era is that so many of the so called watchdogs have neutered themselves. So we get Denton applauding the intellectual gutting of one of the nation's finest papers and Jack Shafer--an otherwise fine media critic--losing his nerve on the WSJ. I grew up in New York and watched as Murdoch's NY Post fed and encouraged the very worst instincts in New York for over a decade. Why wouldn't one scream and complain about that?
The conceit of excellence and ambition is a fine thing. Better to go noisy into night than to mimmick the gilt purchased silence of a Marcus Brauchli.