The Decline Of the Wall Street Journal

TW: Tom Ricks nailed the WSJ philosophy a couple of weeks ago:
From Tom Ricks at Foreign Policy:"...Having toiled at the low pay but high morale WSJ for 17 years in my well-spent youth, I can say that the view we held on the news-gathering side of the organization was that the newspaper's business formula was brilliant -- the news side told American business what it needed to hear, while the edit page told American business what it wanted to hear."

TW: But now that Rupert Murdoch (aka owner of Fox and numerous rags in the UK and Australia) has purchased the WSJ he is employing a tried and true strategy- sensationalist headlines. Sex, conflict and bias sell regardless of the venue.

From Felix Salmon at Reuters:

"...Along the top was the headline “Bankers Face Sweeping Curbs on Pay” — something which occasioned Justin Fox to note that “in the pre-Murdoch era that would have been a 600-word story on page A24, headlined ‘Fed Mulls Pay Guidelines’.”

Underneath that headline was the biggest front-page story: “U.S. Missile U-Turn Roils Allies”. Except there was nothing in the story to indicate that any allies were roiled at all. The online story now has the headline “Allies React to U.S. Missile U-Turn”, along with a formal correction of the old headline.

...The WSJ is now being edited by a man who cut his teeth in the fiercely competitive Australian and UK markets, where front-page stories drive newsstand sales and newsstand sales drive profits. Sweeping curbs on pay and roiled allies make for great headlines, and mean that readers are that much more likely to shell out $2 for the paper

...The WSJ doesn’t need to do this, but Murdoch does: it’s in his blood. A Murdoch paper without punchy headlines which grab you by the throat is pretty much a contradiction in terms. Readers of the WSJ will have to get used to trusting the stories more than the headlines..."