Wall Street Journal to Change its Look

The Wall Street Journal is a dinosaur in many respects. In a field dominated by bright colors and short articles, the WSJ is a text-rich read that has some of the finest reporting anywhere. That is going to change in January, according to its publisher, Dow Jones & Co. While it is necessary for any publication to evolve, one can’t help but believe that these are not changes for the better. And besides, the one thing that really needs changing at the paper is the hyper-reactionary editorial page, not the page width.

Revealed earlier today at a press briefing, Dow Jones announced that the WSJ is just going to more like other papers. Less distinct apparently makes the publishers happy, but one can’t think why. Perhaps they don’t realize that the Financial Times is more than just the pink paper upon which it is printed, and that theirs is notable for avoiding USA Today’s pie-chart journalism. Perhaps it is the business world’s love of PowerPoint presentations at work. While a picture may be worth 1,000 words, one always doubts if they are the right words. As Carl Sagan noted, there are as many bytes of data in the Library of Congress as there are broadcast in a small city every year – not all data are equal.

So, on January 2, 2007, the Wall Street Journal is going to be three inches thinner. That’s about one column of its current layout. One genuine improvement is the reduction in the number of articles that “jump” to other pages from the initial page. A good layout editor can almost always avoid a jump, and few papers run articles long enough to justify a jump – the WSJ, is one of those few. Less page turning means more concentration.

Other papers have already gotten thinner. Most of the British quality press has left the broadsheet style; few can even remember when The Times had classifieds on the front page. And in America, the few broadsheets that survive are facing pressure to resize and redesign. Most newspaper publishers, like Gannet, know that the internet and e-publishing are their future anyway.

L. Gordon Crovitz, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and executive vice president of Dow Jones, said, “Our ambition is to be the first newspaper rethought for how people consume news.” It won’t be, but the question that should be asked is to what extent the paper has affected how business people consume the news in the first place. Dow Jones appears to be moving from a leading role to that of a follower – never a good thing in the news biz. Now, about those brown-shirted editorials . . . .

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home