Do we really want only one newspaper?
As I read (and had pushed to me via IM, email and Twitter) updates on A-Rod's divorce last week, I also saw various takes on interviews Les Hinton, the new head of the Wall Street Journal, has been giving all over the place. In PR speak, he is clearly doing a tour to counter the concerns about Marcus Brauchli leaving (and now joining the Washington Post) and Rupert Murdoch changing the beloved Journal.
"I've read the Journal for 30 years -- more," Mr. Hinton said. "When a big story happened, you'd immediately feel the need to buy another paper. Well, if there's a major earthquake in China, as a recent example, our view is that you should not need to buy another newspaper to know what's going on." As the Journal becomes more comprehensive, Mr. Hinton can imagine 30,000 or 40,000 people deciding every year that it's the only newspaper they need. He can see elites, that is to say, keeping the Journal but quitting the Times.
Now THAT's an interesting challenge -- making the Wall Street Journal the only paper you'll need. I come from a primarily two-paper household -- WSJ and the Boston Globe -- at least in the print editions during the week. [We do subscribe to the local town paper which covers our kids school teams.] Although I do check the Globe business section regularly, I must admit that I primarily read the sports pages in Beantown's local paper. When I want to know the definitive scoop on a major event -- like the founder/CEO of VMWare leaving EMC last week or this morning's story regarding Yahoo! rejecting the deal offered by Microsoft and Carl Icahn -- I look to the WSJ, either online or in print. This is probably how the WSJ has managed to keep charging for their online edition when its competitors have given up these extra dollars. And clearly Murdoch and company are banking on investment in the paper to make it "the only one you need" as a way to keep the value worth the additional price.
I read my Bloglines playlists multiple times a day to check a variety of blogs from publications and pure blogs for news and for the general buzz. Certain blogs have more credibility in my book, usually because of the reputation as a journalist of the person who runs the blog. It's also fascinating to watch many of the blogs pointing to each other's posts or building an item based on another blog's postings. A lot of them seem to use Kara Swisher's BoomTown posts, especially when she gets the jump on a development in something hot like the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal. But then again, Kara has that WSJ mantle around her, even if her only affiliation with the WSJ these days is her former role there and her current involvement in the All Things Digital conference they own.
So Hinton may be onto something about making the WSJ THE destination for news. But does this mean the fun quirky features go away, replaced by more short news items about local, national and international news? Will they bring in great sports writers to give other sports sections some competition? Will they add tabloid headlines to compete with -- and obsolete -- Murdoch's beloved New York Post? (Thinking out loud here) And as nice as it would be to have one absolute source for accurate, credible news, is it even healthy to be limited to one source? Heavens, what if Fox News was the ONLY broadcast news source?!
I, for one, will be watching Hinton's progress with the WSJ with great interest as I ponder all of this. Meanwhile, though, after the initial swirl of coverage last week, when you really couldn't tell if it was just a blog rumor about A-Rod and Madonna, I found an item in the WSJ Law Journal column talking about it which seemed to take it beyond the rumor stage. Of course, the Law Journal focused on what lawyers Cynthia and Alex Rodriguez were using and went on to outline who Madonna has hired to protect her fortune in the case of a split. There it was, in the venerable old WSJ, so it must be true.
