Twitter doet 'het' beter dan Wall Street Journal

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

I'm a long-time WSJ subscriber for a reason, and its NOT because I wanted
wire service snippets in real time. Even if it were, Twitter is doing a
better job than any wire service at the moment. What the WSJ brought was
indeed thoughtful analysis backed by details and data. This action will
remove the WSJ's differentiated competitive advantage. In short - they
have lost this subscriber.
By samgerace   Posted: Mar 25 2009 10:56am ET

Als je het bovenstaande goed leest is de kans groot dat Murdoch ook
Twitter koopt?

Het is in ieder geval symptomatisch voor de kranten- en papiermarkt. Als
die er nog is ;)
 * Houston Chronicle cuts 12 percent of staff:
 * Washington Post, New York Times seek new cost cuts
 * Houston, Atlanta newspapers cutting jobs
 * U.S. bill seeks to rescue faltering newspapers
 * Tembec to curtail newsprint, lumber operations

Het is ook symptomatisch voor de dichotomie van Wall Street, 'long term'
of 'short term.'

Groet / Cees

'Historic' Memo Leaves Feathers Ruffled at 'WSJ'
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/mixed-media/2009/03/24/historic-memo-leaves-feathers-ruffled-at-wsj

Ever since Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones from the Bancroft family,
staffers at The Wall Street Journal have lived in fear of seeing their
unique culture dismantled -- not unreasonably, given Murdoch's public
critiques of the paper's long stories and its baroque editing process.

But perhaps nothing since the ouster of managing editor Marcus Brauchli
almost a year ago has done so much to crystallize that fear as a memo sent
last Thursday by Brauchli's successor, Robert Thomson. On the face of it,
the memo was no different from any number of edicts issued by his
predecessors: Thomson urged Journal reporters to contribute more breaking
news to Dow Jones Newswires and previewed a new system that will
facilitate their doing so.

But the memo's tone and its potentially far-reaching implications ensured
it much scrutiny from anxious Journal employees, many of whom thought they
detected in it the sound of a long-awaited second shoe dropping. "There
was a historic-moment kind of feel about it," says one reporter.

That momentousness lay in Thomson's declaration of a "fundamental shift in
orientation" within the newsroom. Pre-Murdoch, Journal reporters had a
mandate to pursue the sort of in-depth, counter-intuitive and/or quirky
stories that would result in the lengthy page-one articles known as
"leders." Publishing leders was widely seen as the highest aim of the
Journal writer.

But Thomson's memo outlined a newsroom whose occupants are constantly on
the lookout not for leder-worthy ideas but for tiny news bites that can be
pushed out over the wire immediately, there to bestow a momentary
competitive advantage on subscribers.

"Even a headstart of a few seconds is priceless for a commodities trader
or a bond dealer -- that same story can be repurposed for a range of
different audiences, but its value diminishes with the passing of time,"
wrote Thomson. "Given that revenue reality, henceforth all Journal
reporters will be judged, in significant part, by whether they break news
for the Newswires."

Horrifying? More than a few longtime Journal veterans thought so.

"It's a pretty definitive statement to say that henceforth people will be
significantly judged by the frequency with which they break news for bond
traders," says the reporter. "That hasn't really been the mission of
reporters here. It was to make sense of events for the lay reader, and to
dig into stories and tell stories in a way that people would remember."

"It's depressing to a lot of people who have been there for a long time,"
says an ex-staffer who left recently. "Maybe there's a market for selling
this shit to people who are creating trading algorithms, but there's
nobody on the Journal's staff who wants to write that stuff. You didn't
sign up to write 130-word squibs. You signed up to file 3,000-word
mini-New Yorker stories for the front page."

Compounding the depression is a layer of confusion generated by Murdoch's
talk about putting the Journal onto a footing where it can compete against
The New York Times on all fronts. "Now we're being told that our real
competition isn't the Times -- it's Bloomberg and Reuters," says the
ex-staffer. "You're turning us all into wire reporters. It's all going to
be nuggets written by scriveners who get 700 words to spread their wings."
And people will put up with it, he says, because "there's no other place
you can go if you want to stay in journalism."

(Some people are evidently willing to accept that trade-off: Two reporters
in the Journal's Washington bureau, Glenn Simpson and Susan Schmidt,
recently resigned to start their own investigations business. "I think
it's safe to say that the industry is going through difficult times and
it's not clear what the future of investigative journalism at newspapers
is," said Simpson when I called him.)

It didn't help that the language of Thomson's memo was far from
diplomatic. One source described it as "contemptuous" of the Journal and
its ways; another highlighted the "sneering quality" of Thomson's words.
One passage that caused particular alarm was his assertion that the value
of news "is sometimes better recognised by our readers than our
journalists."

"That's a pretty nasty little slap, when you think about it," says the
ex-staffer, "because when you flip it, it means reporters know nothing."

I emailed Thomson to ask about the reception of his memo but haven't heard
back. Update, 3/25/09: Somehow, my email did not find its way to Thomson's
in-box, leaving him unaware of my request for comment until well after
this article was posted.

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