Diluting the WSJ

In a presidential campaign, candidates triangulate towards the center. The Democrat knows he has his party's hard-core supporters in the bag; the Republican likewise. So both tend to take those hard-core supporters for granted and chase after other voters.

According to Joe Nocera, it seems the Wall Street Journal is doing the same thing: taking its business readership for granted and going for a more mainstream audience.

On Tuesday, there wasn't a single mainstream business story in the entire first section. And the business stories that did run lacked the kind of nuance, analysis and wonderful story-telling that used to characterize The Wall Street Journal I loved ...
He is changing the paper. Mr. Murdoch believes that the country is yearning for a national conservative daily, so that is where he is taking The Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch is betting that the WSJ's core business audience has nowhere else to turn, and Nocera himself says that he, personally, will never stop subscribing to the Journal. So the strategy does make some sense, in the short to medium term.

But in the longer term, it's destructive to the WSJ's franchise. Today's businessmen -- the commuters in suits on the 7:05 from somewhere in Westchester -- might be a given for Murdoch. But tomorrow's aren't. And if the WSJ becomes increasingly indistinguishable, in terms of the stories it runs, from other mainstream media outlets, there's no reason that the commuters of tomorrow won't be consuming something entirely different on their mobile devices. Maybe it will be an alternative business daily, maybe it will be some kind of aggregated content from around the web, maybe it will be a collection of or video business podcasts. But if the WSJ brand becomes diluted, Murdoch will find, sooner or later, that he can't take the paper's core readership for granted any more.

Comments

[lcs]

Murdoch is a cultural barbarian. He feeds on mediocrity, repackages it and sells it for profit.

[AlexS]

Good point. As a long time WSJ reader I've noticed that more and more stories are from the standard left of center big media view. It's disturbing. I pay, what is it, $100-150 a year for the WSJ, and it's gotten to the point that the editorial page and perhaps a couple of pages around it are written for a conservative readership. On the other hand, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Times are good sources for the vast right-wing conspiracy, of which I am proud to be an unofficial member.

[Michael]

Felix -
as always, you are dead on.

[Donald E. L. Johnson]

I began reading my dad’s WSJ in the ’50s and began my journalism career there in the ’60s. And I’ve always subscribed. The Journal’s political coverage is better reported and written than anything I see elsewhere, and I read a lot. At times, it’s just too much politics, even for this politics junky. Yet, the WSJ is a more interesting source of political news than the NYT, and WP. And its blogs allow immediate comment by smart people. Business coverage is changing. I’m seeing more analytical market reports, a bit more opinionated and even advisory stories. It’s not the Investor’s Business Daily, but it has moved in that direction. I, too, miss the page one stories, but they often appealed to insiders. The paper is more populist now. The editorial page has little credibility or integrity, what with it’s support for illegal immigration and amnesty, and the Personal Journal has gone flat. Barron’s is pretty good, but seekingalpha.com is much better for stock pickers and investors. There is better data in IBD and at investors.com. BusinessWeek has swung left and become irrelevant. FT and Economist are big picture pubs, generally useless for investors. Forbes, Portfolio, Fortune seldom offer anything worth reading.

[jafdc]

Thank God for the Financial Times (except for their pricing policies).