By Claudia Rosett, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Free men and free markets have just combined to produce a buyout by Rupert Murdoch of the Wall Street Journal. We're now seeing a lot of hand-wringing over what might happen to a newspaper that has been for decades an American icon. Will it change?
Sure. But the imperatives have less to do with Murdoch per se than with the ways of a fast-changing marketplace. What so often gets downplayed in discussions of the news trade is that even the fourth estate is a business, serving customers - and trying to discern what they want to buy. And both journalists and their readers inhabit a world in some ways quite different from what it was even 25 years ago.
Having worked for the Journal from 1984 to 2002, and written more recently as an outside contributor on occasion to both the Journal and Murdoch's Fox News, I've followed the dickering of the last three months with a mix of nostalgia and curiosity. Change? The news business, including the Journal, has been caught up for years already in some of the most radical changes sweeping the globe. Technology is just part of the story, itself a product of that market process known as creative destruction. But in many ways technology has been both engine and emblem of the evolving business we call reporting the news.
This sale has stirred memories of the whopping changes I've witnessed since walking into the Journal's Chicago bureau in 1980 to serve a brief stint as a lowly intern.
In those days, we banged out stories on manual typewriters, and revised them with scissors and tape (not paste). If you had an urge to communicate with people in Mali or Mongolia, you pretty much had to hope that someday you'd become a correspondent important enough that the paper would buy you a ticket. By the time I arrived at the Journal's New York headquarters, in 1984, there were computers to write on, but if you wanted to look up old news stories, you went to the in-house library - once known in news jargon as the "morgue" - and paged through folders of yellowing clips.
In those days, whatever the scoops from Wall Street, global business news moved to a slower beat. There was no weekend edition, let alone online updates. I still prize the memory of a lunchtime conversation in 1986, when one of my colleagues leaned across the table to ask a Page One editor - it was a Friday - "So, what stories are you keeping cryogenically alive till Monday?"
When the Journal posted me to its Hong Kong office in 1986, production of the Asian edition still entailed a production crew running printouts of the finished articles through a hot-wax machine and pasting them onto a big set of boards to be transformed into printing plates. Last-minute editing changes often got done by carving up the copy with a razor blade. In those days, we marveled at the power of the fax machine. Then came cable TV, the Internet, blogs, Google, YouTube, you-name-it - the vast emporium in which we can now shop for news.
Like any huge change, this one has had its downs and ups. Downs: To our peril, radical Islam has hitched a ride on this revolution, learning to use the tools of instant, anonymous, self-perpetuating mass communication to disseminate its ideas. Ups: At the same time, the increasing flow of information over the last generation helped bring down the Soviet Union, wedge open China and democratize large swaths of Asia and Latin America. Increasingly, what was once the laborious job of digging up any information at all on some parts of the planet has become the challenge of discerning - amid a torrent of information - what really matters.
How is that decided? In our market system, where for the media it is profit or perish, the final arbiter of what will be distilled into our major newspapers is neither the owner, nor the publisher, nor the editors, but the customer. The Journal found a niche more than a century ago for reporting with integrity to readers who wanted accurate news, in part because some folks just enjoy good reporting, and in part because many of them had money on the line. Those same appetites clearly exist today, thus the hand-wringing over the Journal sale. And whatever it might mean for the future of the Wall Street Journal, or its worthy competition, someone is going to get rich trying to satisfy that market. I'd say, sit back and enjoy the news titans slugging it out to deliver, in a 21st-century package, exactly what you want.
Pursuant to Title 17 U.S.C. 107, other copyrighted work is provided for educational purposes, research, critical comment, or debate without profit or payment. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for your own purposes beyond the 'fair use' exception, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Views are those of authors and not necessarily those of Canada Free Press. Content is Copyright 1997-2024 the individual authors. Site Copyright 1997-2024 Canada Free Press.Com Privacy Statement