Rupert makes his move
THE SALE OF Dow Jones to Murdoch has been greeted by much clucking in the press. Every paper, with the exception of The New York Sun and maybe the Journal itself, seems to have concluded that this is the sad, if inevitable, end to the long, lustrous legacy of a fine journalistic institution. Most columnists point to other supposedly fine papers that were ruined by the man once called the Dirty Digger. Case in point: The Times of London. No one remembers that that gray lady had become pretty frail by the end of the Thomson era. In 1981, when Murdoch took over, the bureau system (which the Times may have invented) was moribund. No longer was there a Times man in every outpost of the Empire serving as an alternative conduit to Whitehall for frustrated foreign ministers. Not that they needed one: the Empire itself was gone.
It’s still the Journal
TUESDAY morning I opened the door, and in front of the apartment across the hall was a copy of the Wall Street Journal. My own was buried beneath The New York Times and the Financial Times, and I had to get the papers onto the kitchen table before I realized that the Journal had changed. It was smaller; less than a foot wide. Last week it would have stuck out of the stack.
Stop the press, they’re putting ads on the page!
A WHILE back The New York Times, announcing that it was going to put ads on the front of the Business section,* mentioned, with a shudder, that the Wall Street Journal was actually going to put ads on their Page One.