Newsflash: Competitor Moves Photocopier!!

Jeff Jarvis nailed it by loudly scratching his head about the 450 words the NYT's Geraldine Fabrikant spilled today on the renaming of a section of the WSJ's Saturday paper ("Pursuits"), which will now take on the name of its counterpart from the Friday paper ("Weekend").

Jarvis asks the obvious questions.

"Who could possibly give a damn? And why would they?"

Dunno. The 20 grumpy souls who churn the innards of the New York media echo chamber, maybe? That's the only answer Jack Flack can summon.

If so, that's fine, because every community has its own sense of self-obsession, a tendency significantly empowered by the web.

But why did the NYT give slightly more coverage to the renaming of an inside section of a Saturday newspaper than it gave to, say, the issuance of an arrest order of a Russian businessman who had recently published a letter critical of his government?

Some combination of four reasons:

Reason 1: As noted, self-obsession within the echo chamber.

Reason 2: Because one story was a "scoop," and the other was not.

The NYT story was undoubtedly triggered by an earlier Gawker shriek, which proclaimed the "end" of "Pursuits," but then acknowledged it was simply a "rebranding." Never short on drama, Gawker also told us that WSJ reporters would "soon be herded into a meeting" to hear the news.

Jack then assumes Fabrikant then made a few calls to friends and friends-of-friends at the Journal, and got enough facts to manufacture a MSM scoop. Yes, a teeny-tiny scoop, but a scoop nonetheless.

The Gutseriev story, on the other, was public property from the get-go.

Obligingly, Reuters then followed with a sparser account. After all, if it's that important to the Times, then it must be wire-worthy, right?

Reason 3: Rupert Hysteria.
Jarvis suggests that, following the Murdoch conquest story, reporters and editors got "too accustomed to covering every burp out of Dow Jones." That's probably true, but Jack assumes that the scrutiny will only get more intense, as we are entering a day when the movement of a single DJ photocopier from one end of the hallway to the other will be scrutinized for what in means in the coming of the Murdochian World.

Reason 4: Competitive aggression mixed with schadenfreude.
Jarvis asked, "Is somebody waiting to use this as evidence that Murdoch is dumbing down the Journal?"

Of course. Journalists are among the most competitive people in the world, and rival news organizations always slam each other. With the New York tabloids, it's at least explicit. But with most others, it's almost always dressed in the guise of protecting the Fourth Estate.

Does that mean that reporters' concerns about the sanctity of journalism are insincere? Not at all. But those concerns also provide a nice vehicle for stitching up the other guy.

How much ink, for instance, was dedicated to covering "just how much damage the Jason Blair affair has done in weakening the credibility of the New York Times?" The pack had a chance to close the gap on its leader, and it did so with ruthless solemnity.