'Historic' Memo Leaves Feathers Ruffled at 'WSJ'

Ever since Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones from the Bancroft family, staffers at The Wall Street Journal have lived in fear of seeing their unique culture dismantled -- not unreasonably, given Murdoch's public critiques of the paper's long stories and its baroque editing process.

But perhaps nothing since the ouster of managing editor Marcus Brauchli almost a year ago has done so much to crystallize that fear as a memo sent last Thursday by Brauchli's successor, Robert Thomson. On the face of it, the memo was no different from any number of edicts issued by his predecessors: Thomson urged Journal reporters to contribute more breaking news to Dow Jones Newswires and previewed a new system that will facilitate their doing so.

But the memo's tone and its potentially far-reaching implications ensured it much scrutiny from anxious Journal employees, many of whom thought they detected in it the sound of a long-awaited second shoe dropping. "There was a historic-moment kind of feel about it," says one reporter.

That momentousness lay in Thomson's declaration of a "fundamental shift in orientation" within the newsroom. Pre-Murdoch, Journal reporters had a mandate to pursue the sort of in-depth, counter-intuitive and/or quirky stories that would result in the lengthy page-one articles known as "leders." Publishing leders was widely seen as the highest aim of the Journal writer.

But Thomson's memo outlined a newsroom whose occupants are constantly on the lookout not for leder-worthy ideas but for tiny news bites that can be pushed out over the wire immediately, there to bestow a momentary competitive advantage on subscribers.

"Even a headstart of a few seconds is priceless for a commodities trader or a bond dealer -- that same story can be repurposed for a range of different audiences, but its value diminishes with the passing of time," wrote Thomson. "Given that revenue reality, henceforth all Journal reporters will be judged, in significant part, by whether they break news for the Newswires."

Horrifying? More than a few longtime Journal veterans thought so.

"It's a pretty definitive statement to say that henceforth people will be significantly judged by the frequency with which they break news for bond traders," says the reporter. "That hasn't really been the mission of reporters here. It was to make sense of events for the lay reader, and to dig into stories and tell stories in a way that people would remember."

"It's depressing to a lot of people who have been there for a long time," says an ex-staffer who left recently. "Maybe there's a market for selling this shit to people who are creating trading algorithms, but there's nobody on the Journal's staff who wants to write that stuff. You didn't sign up to write 130-word squibs. You signed up to file 3,000-word mini-New Yorker stories for the front page."

Compounding the depression is a layer of confusion generated by Murdoch's talk about putting the Journal onto a footing where it can compete against The New York Times on all fronts. "Now we're being told that our real competition isn't the Times -- it's Bloomberg and Reuters," says the ex-staffer. "You're turning us all into wire reporters. It's all going to be nuggets written by scriveners who get 700 words to spread their wings." And people will put up with it, he says, because "there's no other place you can go if you want to stay in journalism."

(Some people are evidently willing to accept that trade-off: Two reporters in the Journal's Washington bureau, Glenn Simpson and Susan Schmidt, recently resigned to start their own investigations business. "I think it's safe to say that the industry is going through difficult times and it's not clear what the future of investigative journalism at newspapers is," said Simpson when I called him.)

It didn't help that the language of Thomson's memo was far from diplomatic. One source described it as "contemptuous" of the Journal and its ways; another highlighted the "sneering quality" of Thomson's words. One passage that caused particular alarm was his assertion that the value of news "is sometimes better recognised by our readers than our journalists."

"That's a pretty nasty little slap, when you think about it," says the ex-staffer, "because when you flip it, it means reporters know nothing."

I emailed Thomson to ask about the reception of his memo but haven't heard back. Update, 3/25/09: Somehow, my email did not find its way to Thomson's in-box, leaving him unaware of my request for comment until well after this article was posted.