Tech Edit Spotlight: the Wall Street Journal May 2009

SWMS Editorial Teleconference Series:

Tech Edit Spotlight: The Wall Street Journal May 2009

Well into its second year under the stewardship of News Corp., the Wall Street Journal remains an enigma. Its circulation has risen when virtually all competitors have retrenched. Most PR pros still view it as the place to be. But underneath the mighty brand, edit quality has slipped. Typos. Less thought leadership. Departures of key talent. But things could be worse. Iironically for those who feared the worst from Rupert Murdoch, only News Corp.’s deep pockets have kept the WSJ from the fiscal pain affecting every other newspaper in America. The WSJ remains the most powerful editorial brand there is. SWMS Webinar Link

The Mission From a business standpoint, the WSJ cares about the collision of telecom- munications and computing as it affects society. And in The Journal’s esti- mation, society is all about markets. Retailing, customer service... technology, and particularly communications technologies have radically trans- formed every single business there is, which is why The Wall Street Journal cares about it.

Kill The Times, Kill The Post, and don’t be boring. Write breaking news.  Priority #1: Beat The New York Times.  Priority #2: Marcus Brauchli and The Washington Post. Brauchli is a former Wall Street Jour- SWMS Teleconference nal managing editor. There seems to be a personal vendetta going on, not only to take down Links & Insight The New York Times, but Murdoch also intends to put pressure on The Washington Post as well by putting the resources in Washington D.C. inside the beltway and give The Washington Post fits. WSJ 2007 Tech Edit Spotlight Priority #3: Moving away from evergreen features and long thousand‑word pieces and mov-  New York Times ing toward scoops. Marcus Brauchli What else keeps the WSJ at night? The Wall Street Journal, and broadly speaking, News Corp., expected to be making money in Scoops social media by now. This was in their business plan for 2009 to launch The Wall Street Journal’s own branded community site, to have the marketwatch community pay off -- and also the real big MySpace isn't making money

money was supposed to come from MySpace. It hasn’t. No copy desk

Think about what News Corp. now owns. It’s not just The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, Overstaffed... remember: There’s The Wall Street Journal, Marketwatch, Barron’s, All Things D, Smart Money, Dow Jones Newswire. And then, there’s the Fox Business Network, Digits blog... the best place to pitch Check out Lewis Dvorkin’s (formerly AOL, Ziff Davis) new business called True/Slant, a combina- tion of vendor publishing and crowd-sourced content. Community -- not there

Social media clampdown A telling departure: Joshua Prager A very distinguished journalist, Prager wrote a fairly long, (and undoubtedly he felt this would be- AllThingsD.com come a public) note. Among his comments: News videos are very rare “I hope that my incredible colleagues, despite their understandable fears given the state of our industry, will find ways to speak up when necessary. It is certainly in the interest of Lauren Goode -- multimedia producer any business to know what is on the minds of its employees.”

Marisa Taylor -- freelancer “Further, the worship of byline and word counts and all that is ‘urgent’ has doubtless sti- fled the boundless creativity of the Journal staff. I hope the paper will address this prob- Michael Totty and lem.” WSJ The Special Report

So you’ve got excellent, proud and now fearful journalists who are essentially being told, ‘If you can’t do a bulletin, then don’t do anything else. Long-form journalism is not really the business we’re in.’

SWMS Editorial Teleconference Series: Tech Edit Spotlight: The Wall Street Journal May 2009

Community building? From what we hear, WSJ journalists aren’t under any pressure to build community. They aren’t really being pressured to do anything except break news. But as far as building out the content footprint of the WSJ product, we’re not asked to participate in discussions. Nor are they asked to participate in leaving comments or responding to comments. PR pitchers: Try this Ping Andrew LaVallee or Julia Angwin at The Journal and ask, “What kind of piece are you looking for that you feel like best embodies what you’re trying to do strategically? Is there a quintessential sort of post that you’re trying to distinguish from Bits?” Get them to de- fine what that is and see if you can deliver it.

Digits Technology news and insight blog Digits’ reader comments are low compared to the New York Times’ Bits blog

We have a story to tell you about Digits. On May 21, the day we presented our SWMS Tech Edit Spotlight, three of the top ten most recent posts concerned the TV program “American Idol.” We called attention to the fact that American Idol is a News Corp. property, and that yesteryear’s Wall Street Journal would never stoop to such pandering and toadyism. If you spot check the WSJ Digits blog these days, you’ll very likely find that it offers competitive tech content, devoid of the click bait of 5/21. This is a phenomenon to watch, however. Even the mighty WSJ is not immune to the power of page views and their influence on profitability.

Tech Coverage Pui-Wing Tam runs it with Don Clark out in the west coast bureau in San Francisco.

Amol Sharma ran it in the east -- but since has been reassigned to Asia. Rebecca Blumenstein will soon replace him.

Julia Angwin runs the Digits blog.

Relatively speaking, the three don’t collaborate all that much, and there’s really nobody out there above them in The Wall Street Jour- nal masthead that sits them down regularly or has conference calls and says, “Hey, how are we doing? Maybe we should do it more this way or that,” any sort of strategic oversight. That’s not happening.

There’s no copy desk at The Journal any more, really. There’s an increasing number of typos and errors. The people in the West Coast bureau don’t have a computer system that allows them to see the composed page, the print page. They write their stories on Microsoft Word and send them over to New Jersey, and then a whole different set of people write headlines and finish the job of producing the newspaper or the Web site. So once the re- porter files the copy out of Word, that’s pretty much the end of it.

Some folks to look out for:  Marketplace: Elyse Tanouye edits Marketplace (Melinda Beck now oversees healthcare.)  Personal Journal: John Blanton runs it. He worked at The Journal in the ‘80s and ’90’s but left to become a nurse, and has now returned. Here’s some advice about phrasing a pitch: lead it, or create an ingredient where an actor in your story, whether it’s the CEO or whoever it is you’re profiling, had some sort of dramatic experience happen to him or her in their lives and that caused a change and veered them from strategic direction to another. This is what Blanton experienced in his own life.  Katie Bohret: These days she likes applications for mobile phones, and widgets that show up on your TV. But that oversimplifies things a bit.  Special Reports: Michael Totty While he won’t give away details on upcoming projects he does save and learn from email pitches. It doesn’t hurt to lead your e‑mails to him saying, “Here is one for your files, perhaps for a future special report.”  Marissa Taylor. One of the go‑to people at the Digits blog. She’s a freelancer based in the Bay area - reach her at mhtay- [email protected]. She’s showing up a lot, both in Digits and really elsewhere on the site, and she has Julia Angwin’s trust and respect, so she’s sort of a go‑to generalist right now.

Video, multimedia assets Jessica Vascellero: this video link is an example of only a few that the WSJ tech team has produced all year. Lauren Goode: A multimedia producer in the east - [email protected].

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SWMS Editorial Teleconference Series: Tech Edit Spotlight—The Wall Street Journal May 2009

We hear that across the bureaus, New York and all over the United States, WSJ reporters are under no pressure to do videos, except if the story is going to run on Page 1 in print. Then they want a package.

So when pitching The Journal, reach big. Anticipate front-page story elements: packaging, high‑res photography for a slide show, or video, or both.

Columns Columns are attractive in general for PR: the bar is so much lower because you don’t need sources and analysts and so forth. When you stop and think about it, all you really need to sell the columnist on is the power of the idea, or the click-ability of the idea. Another thing going PR’s way is that The Wall Street Journal is increasingly a consumer property, that’s where News Corp is steering it, you don’t always have to talk bits and bytes. You can talk about lifestyle.