As the world economies continue to spiral into chaotic, frightening nonsense...in a time when we're actively questioning the very institutions on which we once instinctively relied... the Wall Street Journal has come up with the key to its relevance and utility as a newspaper:More sports coverage.
This would be entirely idiotic if 1) it wasn't actually standard newspaper strategy, and b) it didn't fit into the developmental trend at the paper since Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought the Journal's parent, Dow Jones & Co. Or maybe it's entirely idiotic because of these two facts.
Newspapers are busy going extinct all over the country because the Internet evolved a better engine for the classified ads that once supported them. Combine that with the ubiquity of content (the stuff formerly known as "news" when it was vetted, and at least somewhat reliably true) and the constant risk that your newspaper would be soggy or missing on any given morning, and you're left with not a lot going for newspapers other than, well, reporting the news.
Most papers have helped bleed themselves to death by ignoring this fact, and instead trying to mimic the medium with which they mistakenly believe they compete: dropping reporters, making stories more breezy or generic, and even reformatting layouts so they look like static web pages, and so people will have even less of a reason to read them.
One of the few, if only, bright spots in this slow process of dissolution has been sports reporting which, along with local talk radio, remains a real driver of consumption above and beyond whatever is available online. So prompting that readership means a bright, if flickering, light for advertisers.Therefore, it makes sense that the new Journal would get more of it. The newspaper got its own glossy lifestyle magazine last year (I wrote about it) for a similar purpose, along with expanded lifestyle coverage.
It's clear that its new editors and marketing strategists believe their mandate is to expand the tools to deliver more ads to its readers. Newspaper as ad delivery mechanism. It's a 100 year-old idea. And it's why I think the Journal has got it dead wrong.The real challenge to Journal readership isn't online distribution, but rather its lack of authority and true, meaningful insight. It, like "the" markets in general, has failed to give us any real insight into what's going on, why it's happening, or what we can do about it, whether as individuals, or within/through our businesses.
It's mandate isn't to deliver more ads, but rather to deliver more news.Yet its editorial pages are filled with stridently one-sided opinions, happy to argue politics that utterly obfuscate any comprehension, let alone resolution, of the issues the paper otherwise reports. The Journal doesn't tell us anything we couldn't find out from any other news source, and its interpretive screeds are no better than a print version of Fox News. So giving the world more sports coverage is no worse than its TV cousins hiring babes to bicker about "the culture war."
It's just no better, either.The situation today in America (and the world) presents a unique opportunity for a media resource like the Wall Street Journal to earn new respect, prompt new engagement, and get a new generation of readers hooked on relying on it: what if the paper convened a Manhattan-style project to cover and analyze what's going on -- sans politics, or otherwise "balanced" with competing views that are somehow resolved into authoritative conclusions -- and made itself the de facto go-to destination for news?
It might involve: Refocusing some reporter beats, to get more perspective or contextInventing new columns or entire sections in the paperForging content alliances with a variety of other mediaEstablishing connections with government and private entities that could help contribute to the news coverage and interpretationProposing real metrics (numbers, ratios) by which it, and then we, can better understand and track what's going onOffer conclusions, or at least bold interpretations, of the news, but based on some consensus of thought, not the skewed blather of its editorial writers, andBring willing to cover its mistakes, misses, and the other gee, we didn't see that coming observations that permeate the economic crisis, yet nobody has even begun to address how or why everybody didn't see what was up (which is the scary part, as why should we believe the Journal is covering what's going to prove most important to have known a few months from now?)In other words, it could choose to give us truly unique, relevant content.
We need it, now more than ever. We need information that has insight and meaning, because right now, we're all pretty much lost. Providing it might prove to be the greatest draw to would-be advertisers. Instead, the paper is going to give us more sports. Read it and weep.
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