Small Street Journal
I note with sadness the subtle decline of the Wall Street Journal. It’s very unpleasant to see, since I once dreamed of working there, but now wonder if long-form journalism is what they’re about. The best parts of the paper are the columns and the cultural coverage. Very very infrequently do I find a business story that really blows me away.
It was not always so. The Wall Street Journal owned the NYSE collapse. In a sense, print journalism was collapsing at the same time and the two were linked to the same cause. The criminal in this destruction was not Dick Grasso’s pay package, of course, but the same cheap computing and standardized network protocols that automated trading while changing the way we consume information.
Today, I see I’m not the only one to notice the subtle shifts. Writing about a quirky story in today’s WSJ, Gawker points out:
Lorre’s little game is revealed today in one of the Wall Street Journal’s increasingly rare marginalized A-Heds, the long and colorful front-page stories that were the signature of the business newspaper before it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
More insidious is the sloppy reporting that has creeped in to some stories. To pick one slight example: in Saturday’s article Falling Off an ETF Seesaw, an article about an novel investment structure that hadn’t quite worked as planned, the Journal quoted a blogger to disparage Robert Shiller, a highly respected economist.
“About the only redeeming feature of the controversial MacroShares” is “that they automatically blow up” at a certain oil-futures-contract price, wrote Greg Newton on markets Web site Naked Shorts recently.
That’s the only comment from Newton, the former publisher of MarHedge. I wonder if the Journal actually gave Newton a chance to comment or if they simply took the statement straight from his blog without him being informed. It’s certainly OK to do so, but I try to call people to see if they might have updated their opinions since saying or writing something (and as a courtesy). My guess is that the Journal couldn’t find too many people willing to disparage Shiller’s work, so they quoted a blogger.
All fine and good, and Greg Newton is a very smart cookie and I read his blog, but it is extremely cavalier for the country’s most respected business paper to simply quote a blogger without any context as to why this person’s opinion should be considered material. It’s very sloppy and it’s the sort of thing we see on TV news; when a producer wants to take a cheap shot, he invites on an expert, but the qualifications for being an expert are never given. It’s simply a matter of calling someone an expert, QED.
As far as I know, Newton’s analysis is correct, but I think it would have behooved the Journal to find a qualified economist or someone who structures ETFs to substantiate this point. Clearly, a sound bite is what was needed and it’s what the Journal’s readers got. We deserve better.
May 17th, 2008 at
I think the decline of the Wall Street Journal since Murdoch took over is a national tragedy. The Journal used to be the authoritative source for in-depth business and financial news. It helped make NYC the financial capital of the world. It was invaluable to investors.
But post-Murdoch the business and financial reporting is slowly disappearing from the front page in favor of “urgency and variety” — read trivia and sensationalism. Now we routinely get 3 and 4 column headlines which in the past were reserved for truly important news. Now we get valuable front page space being used up with color photographs, e.g., one of Obama eating pancakes recently. Now we get front page stories devoted to California’s ruling on same-sex marriages, the use of shark’s teeth as currency in some Pacific island, and other junk that is more appropriate for USA Today or the tabloids.
What we are steadily losing (it gets worse every week) is the in-depth and insightful coverage of business and financial news which used to be the Journal’s beat. The only thing that isn’t changing is the knee-jerk reactionism of the editorial pages; however, it was easy enough to ignore that as long as the rest of the paper was written by competent reporters who stuck to their beat.
I wish someone would start a website devoted to documenting the decline and fall of the Wall Street Journal. This is truly a devastating national event and deserves documentation. I have written to the so-called editorial oversight committee and received no reply. They seem unwilling to act in the face of Murdoch’s persistent dumbing-down and sensationalizing the paper.
Milt Garber
Missouri