It’s been fascinating to see such drama over the possibility of change at a business which is all about covering change itself, otherwise known as reporting the news.
I can understand some of this, both as a reader and former staffer of the Journal, where I worked from 1984-2002. The Journal sale to Rupert Murdoch brought a flash of nostalgia for the days when I first walked into the Chicago bureau in 1980, for a brief stint as a news intern, was shown to a desk with a big heavy telephone, pencils, scissors and tape, and began clacking out stories about commodity markets on a manual typewriter.
The Journal was then six columns wide (not five), one section (not three), all black-and-white (no pastels), and published five days a week (not six). Back then, I believe the only photograph it had ever published was an aerial snapshot run on the editorial page, showing the Chappaquiddick road where Senator Ted Kennedy in 1969 took the fatal turn toward his spill off the Dike bridge, where Mary Joe Kopechne drowned.
Newspapers are not only a source of news, they are part of the comforting routine of daily life. They land on the doorstep and we bring them into our homes and offices, read them over coffee, meld them into our habits and lives. Except, like the long-gone clink of the bottles once left by the long-vanished milkmen of my childhood, all that has been changing anyway. It’s called the creative destruction of the marketplace, it is what brought us The Wall Street Journal to begin with, and in our marvelous system of free men and free markets, it is less to be feared than welcomed — more in my column today for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Footnote about the good old days: They were wonderful, and in honor of the news trade, I’m tempted to go rent that 1940 movie classic, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, “His Girl Friday” — which includes some aspects of human nature that never change. The trade-offs in newspapering since then have been driven by consumer choice, and our world is richer for it. But if anyone thinks there might still be significant demand for a one-section, all-black-and-white, five-day-a-week, print-only, family-controlled, national financial newspaper, filled with stories written on manual typewriters, then there is by now an obvious investment opportunity just waiting.
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