The Fox Street Journal

Quote of the day:
“In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reason or principles contain it or stand against it.”
--Jane Smiley

There’s been lots of hemmin’ and hawwin’ about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation purchasing Dow Jones, the parent of “The Wall Street Journal.” I think the hemmin’ makes sense, but the hawwin’ I’m not so sure about.

The great thing about Murdoch is that he takes a very long-term view. He is willing to lose money on an enterprise as it grows, changes, or establishes itself--even if that takes many years.

He also has a record of understanding the news and communications business. When he started the Fox network back in the 1980s, the assumption was that three networks was plenty. What happened was that he rode the trend away from general-audience programming on the networks toward specialized audiences. Fox has always aimed at younger viewers.

He seems to understand the nascent universal power of the web. He has purchased MySpace, and is very interested in growing Dow Jones’ excellent and profitable websites.

The understandable fear is that Murdoch will Fox-ify “The Wall Street Journal,” one of the world’s premier newspapers, and “Barron’s,” the nation’s best investment weekly. Many staff at the papers are worried that the papers will be glitzed or cheapened.

I was a journalism major in college, and I remember being required to subscribe to Dow Jones’ “The National Observer” for one of my classes. It was a very impressive weekly with top-notch writing and incisive in-depth pieces. I continued to subscribe after my class ended. Unfortunately, “The Observer” was not profitable and ceased publication in the late 1970s.

Later I came to understand that top-notch writing and incisive in-depth reporting also characterized the “Journal” and “Barron’s.” If either of these things are compromised, the papers will lose me as a reader.

Murdoch has said he respects the reputation and trust that both papers have built, and he knows it’s bad business to in any way jeopardize it. At the same time, he has also commented that he “doesn’t have time” to read the three long stories featured each day on the “Journal’s” front page, and that he may shorten them.

That concerns me, because there are already precious few places where such high-quality journalism is available.

I don’t think we’ll see any major changes in the “Wall Street Journal” or “Barron’s.” What is certain, however, is that Rupert Murdoch’s influence will be increasingly apparent, and will be embedded for generations to come. It pays to know a great deal about him.