All those news stories on the front page of the WSJ are making Joe Nocera sad
Sure, you could have read it here first, more or less, but my friend Joe Nocera's wistful critique of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is still worth a look:
Mr. Murdoch believes that the country is yearning for a national conservative daily, so that is where he is taking The Wall Street Journal. He is also an old-fashioned news hound, so he's pushing for straighter, snappier, less analytical stories. As the owner — and as a man with a very clear vision of what he wants — he has every right to impose those changes.
But to me — and I'm speaking now not as a someone who works for a competitor but as someone who has always adored reading The Wall Street Journal — the paper he is producing is less distinctive, less interesting and less important to its core business readership. The Journal of yore always assumed that its readers knew the basic facts of a big story, so it worked hard to find new, fresh angles that required smart reporting and original thinking. The old Journal could barely bring itself to publish a quarterly earnings story without putting it in context for the reader. Most painful for me are the memories I have of the rollicking Wall Street Journal narrative that was such a staple — a behind-the-scenes story about some shenanigans inside a company that only The Journal would ferret out and tell. Nobody else in journalism wrote those stories on a regular basis, and now that The Journal has largely stopped writing them I fear they are going to disappear, like an ancient dialect that dies out. ...
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1
Agreed. It is the end of an era.
Of course, I just had a Time ad pop up twice while I was trying to write this. The old Time wouldn't do that.
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2
WSJ is a significantly better paper than the NYT. He can snipe all he wants, but that won't change the facts.
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3
But safety,
It also doesn't change the fact that the WSJ was a standard bearer in biz news...anything less than stellar product is a national travesty.
What he is lamenting is that high standards of professional in journalism appear to have completely eroded. Replaced instead by 'show me the money' pop culture and articles that do little beyond report.
Somebody in this country has to ask the tough questions, looks for critical failures and applaud rising success. The rah-rah-rah of NYT is all too often over the top along with CNBC, Fox Biz News, and the Wash. Post doesn't even carry the water for financial news.
This is the financial dumbing down of America.
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4
News should be only news, and to tool any paper or other media outlet to any type of political whim or agenda is just wrong. Yes, we're all guilty of greed to some extent, but the news media needs to find ways to make a profit while keeping to standards of excellence, which means balanced, thoughtful reports, so papers are less immune to selling out. Blogs are all good, but there's a higher satisfaction in researching a story, actually interviewing subjects and translating that experience into an article and not just two paragraphs of rehash. (With all due respect, Mr. Fox.)
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