Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones, the company that owns the Wall Street Journal, has set off a round of navel-gazing in the world of serious journalism. Will the Journal continue to be a serious, authoritative voice, or will it slide into a more sensationalistic approach?
And what of the interactivity that Murdoch promises? Will multimedia expansion be a model that other journalists can copy to survive in this multiple-choice Internet world? Or will it encourage more ill-informed ranting?
In a somewhat related development, much attention was paid last weekend to a convention of the unconventional – a glob of bloggers at the YearlyKos convention in Chicago, wherein new journalists considered ways to do what old journalists used to do much better: cover local government.
And closer to home, Colorado Confidential, a local political website that works very hard to be respectable journalism, albeit with a point of view (a liberal one), won more serious kudos for its reporting and commentary. There are blogs, and then there online news sites. The best ones are reliable and accurate, even if they are not impartial.
Meanwhile, the old media – especially newspapers, but broadcast, too – are knocking themselves out trying to compete on the Internet, even while circulation, viewers and advertising revenue continue to decline.
Murdoch says he will broadly expand the Journal’s reach through a variety of new media outlets. On the Web, compared to the printed page, there’s much more capacity for all types of information. There’s also much more need on the Web for the kind of in-depth, careful reporting the Journal is noted for. (The Journal’s editorial policy, of course, is noted more for being in line with Murdoch’s conservative views.)
A writer from Baltimore’s Sun newspaper e-mailed me and several other smarty-pants media observers recently to ask what we thought about this.
“If Murdoch finds the key, others are sure to follow,” the Sun writer wrote. “The odds look long against him, but Murdoch has long shown a relentless willingness to invest and innovate against the odds, a passion less visible elsewhere in the news business.”
So what are Murdoch’s chances? My response was that I’ve never been very comfortable talking about the business side of journalism. If I were able to legitimately judge Murdoch’s chances of success, I probably would by now be a successful newspaper publisher myself, instead of an old retired guy.
Instinctively, though, I’d guess that Murdoch is not so much concerned with the bottom line as he is with the prestige of acquiring the Wall Street Journal.
If he can broaden the Journal’s appeal without alienating its core readership, he will have established a model that other publications would be smart to copy. A lot of what’s going on in mainstream journalism right now has more than a whiff of desperation about it. In reaching out to the users of new media, the old media are trying too hard to “have a conversation instead of a lecture,” as they put it.
Instead of providing authoritative answers, they ask more questions. They want readers to tell them what to cover. It’s as if they’ve turned Murdoch’s Fox News slogan on its head: “You decide. We report.”
If bloggers can provide more information about local government than the short-staffed mainstream press is providing now, more power to them.
And if Murdoch is able to continue to provide an authoritative voice – and accurate, reliable information – while engaging Journal readers, old and new, in an interactive way, he deserves to succeed. If he fails, it’s more bad news for the news business.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
