Vaughan describes the profound affects on the newsroom of Murdoch-imposed priorities, including shifting the Journal from its focus on business and economic news to general news, that is to say, news already covered by others. Sound defensible? Sure. Until you see what kinds of stories are given up in the name of chasing commodity stories. It’s always about resource allocation and editorial priorities:
News Corp.’s decision to prioritize general news over business news —despite our identity as the global business paper of record—was another reason to soul-search….Editors had begun asking seasoned business reporters to defer coverage of developments on their beats in order to track “general news” developments on hurricanes, regional crime and tabloid scandals…essentially, anything but business.
To be fair, no one asked us to ignore major news, like multibillion-dollar deals. But for lots of news that we, the staff reporters, deemed significant, the news desk argued that our Dow Jones Newswires colleagues should cover the story instead. General news had shrunk the corporate “news hole,” and these were likely to be cut to un-bylined briefs anyway, New York argued. Here was the result: a CEO might make headlines—say, revealing a downsizing or a new strategic direction at a press conference—and the wires reporter would be the only one seeking the follow-up interview, rather than a group of reporters.
One thing I learned from my Journal mentors over the years was that a beat reporter dominates her beat by closely watching news and taking every opportunity to interview multiple actors who might play a role and say something newsworthy.
And here’s more:
I do not deny for a minute that the Journal is News Corp.’s paper to run, and that the business model must change for newspapers to survive. Good for them for trying. I also still believe the Journal is a quality business publication with terrific journalists, and it will continue to be one of the few papers with long-term staying power. But it is debatable whether subscribers to a flagship business newspaper like the Journal really want less financial and corporate news. Murdoch and Thomson love talking about how journalists at establishment papers feel entitled and presumptuous. I will concede this is sometimes true. But I would turn their point around: News Corp. feels entitled to ask highly skilled journalists to produce commodity journalism, in return for a relatively low salary in a dying industry.
If talented business journalists care at all about the long-term portability of their skills in a shrinking media world, succumbing to pack journalism in the crowded general news category is no way out. It makes senior, expensive reporters expendable. That was not the direction I wanted my career to be heading…
My career shift is not necessarily good for business journalism or Main Street investing. Increasingly, investors are paying investigative reporters like me to go digging exclusively on their behalf rather than publish our findings for a wider audience. But the exodus is inevitable as newspapers offer less space, time and money for investigative reporting. At least the investment world, which is infamous for missing red flags and failing to ask painfully obvious questions, is now getting more of it.
A couple things:
When News Corp. made its unsolicited bid for Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s floundering parent in the summer of 2007, many protested, including us here at The Audit, for various reasons.
One was News Corp.’s long record of not playing by the rules, which made it an especially bad choice to own what was then still the leading monitor of corporate behavior. What’s more, some argued, the Journal might be tarnished by association with News Corp.’s other units. And what do you know?
But mostly it was that Murdoch’s conception of journalism—banalized, commoditized, tamed—would do irreparable harm to what made the Journal great, its ability to combine comprehensive business news coverage—including world-beating scoops—with literate, sophisticated, in-depth narratives, twice a day, every day, five, then six days a week.
As I wrote at the time, it’s about the stories.
Those of us on the outside looking in could only note the big changes occurring internally and try to connect them to the big changes visible on Page One and throughout the paper.
Within a short time, for instance, Thomson would push out the holdover managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, in a newsroom coup that was ignored by an editorial integrity panel set up before the deal closed specifically to prevent such an occurrence.
Then came the internal memos and discourse that shifted career incentives at the paper from longform narratives—public-interest journalism’s natural habitat—to short-form incremental scoops. The implication of Thomson’s “llama” speech—and a preposterous one, in my view—was that somehow Journal reporters didn’t hustle. Thomson and fellow News Corp. managers also sought to pose a conflict between long-form investigations and market-moving scoops—a false choice if there ever was one. It’s well known that the former often flows from latter, and vice verse. That’s the very definition of great beat reporting. Plus, the notion doesn’t fit with the fact that, when it came to scoops, particularly M&A, the Journal was dominant.
A 2009 memo by Thomson made the new priorities explicit, a Murdochian emphasis driven home again with another memo this year, with, if anything, with even greater force in case the staff didn’t get the message the first time.
Sure enough, the result has been visible.
That’s the number of published stories over 2,500 words.
Here is where we say that, of course, the Journal still produces great work. Whether the paper is as great and as great as often as it used be is a debate for another day. But, in my view, those who think so are dreaming.
