The 2020 Election Has Laid Bare Some Festering Problems At The Wall Street Journal

By now, it’s an old story in American journalism — one that nobody, except for maybe The New York Times
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, has figured out an ending for yet. You know the story: Venerable newspaper strives to confront the digital imperatives of the modern era, without cutting the nagging umbilical cord to the past. The one that pays the bills, thanks to a dwindling base of subscribers who keep getting older and keep forking over more of their income to pay for an annual subscription to an anachronistic print edition. This is a story that’s, sadly, all-too-familiar at too many newspapers in small towns and even mid-sized cities around the US.

But even the country’s most storied media properties aren’t immune to the inevitability of journalistic entropy. For proof, look no further than what’s happening now inside The Wall Street Journal, wracked at the moment by an internal war between reporters and opinion writers over coverage of the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Just a few days ago, reporters on the news side of The Journal ran a news story that pushed back against a piece prepared by The Journal’s own opinion section that purported to reveal a corruption scheme and shady dealings involving Biden, his son Hunter, and various shadowy elements in Ukraine. Needless to say, such internecine warfare within the newspaper’s ranks — and spilling onto the pages of the printed product, no less — is an extraordinary turn of events, to say the least.

As if that wasn’t enough of a black eye to deal with — the paper’s own news staff hitting back at the paper’s opinion side — now comes a leaked report from within the newspaper itself, which had been circulated among the paper’s leadership before leaking to the public. The gist of the report: The Journal is fast becoming the equivalent of a vinyl turntable in a digital-first world. Among other problems.

This internal critique of the inner-workings at the newspaper is a brutal read, was first obtained and reported by BuzzFeed News, and should worry anyone who regards The Journal as a Thing That Must Be Saved.

Among the report’s scathing commentary are findings that include:

• Racial news not being sufficiently covered, because reporters are apparently skittish about pitching ideas to editors. According to US news editor Emily Nelson, who’s quoted in the report, “Reporters self-censor and don’t suggest those stories enough. They’re worried about the scrutiny of how it will be written.” Additionally —
• The reports describes the paper as akin to a band playing to a shrinking audience, one that is affluent but aging;
• The Journal’s great ship of state is also still too heavily titled toward the needs of “a print edition that lands in the recycling bin”;
• And greater effort needs to be made to ensure the paper stops losing more subscribers than it brings on.

Elsewhere, the report goes on to propose that reporters ought to quote more “real people” in stories, as opposed to clubby, inside-baseball, expert voices. The former, including end users and ordinary people affected by the news stories in question, appear in only about a quarter of the newspaper’s articles, per this report.

“Here’s the bottom line,” it reads. “If we want to grow to 5.5 million digital subscribers, and if we continue with churn, traffic and digital growth about where they are today — it will take us on the order of 22 years.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Journal’s editor in chief Matt Murray gave BuzzFeed News a statement that tries to downplay the most scathing of the report’s implications. Murray responded, for example, that the document is “a months-old draft that contains outdated and inaccurate information.

“The Wall Street Journal,” he continues, “is experiencing tremendous digital growth in audience, advertising and subscriptions, in fact has hit new records, and we are more excited than ever about our future. We, of course, regularly discuss and explore what we are doing, and where we should be going. We have a strong foundation as the best source of business, markets and economics news in the world, and we are incredibly proud to serve all of our readers.”

For a journalist toiling away in the provinces, far from the great gilded walls of the city — in this case, New York City, which is still the beating heart epicenter of the US’ modern media landscape — an assessment like this from a powerhouse like The Journal can send a chill through the veins. If not even the crown jewel in the empire of a media baron like Rupert Murdoch is safe from the vicissitudes of the angry waves of commerce that have capsized so many bastions of journalism, then who and where among us is safe?

We may be seeing the last days of the last vestiges of the printed newspaper industry in America, even now. McClatchy earlier this year announced a furlough of a little more than 4% of its workforce. Gannett
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is trying to cut as much as $125 million from its budget this year, and Tribune announced it would trim salaries for non-union employees. Outgoing New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said back in August that he thinks it’s “quite possible” there will still be a paper version of The Times you can hold in your hands 15 years from now — but probably not 20 years hence.

For anybody who cares about journalism in America, the full WSJ report is worth a read. It’s a reminder, if nothing else, not to take for granted the things we have that we think we deserve — that information may want to be free, but the news can’t be. If 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it should be this: That the life we know, the things we love, can be vaporized in an instant. And so it is with newspapers, not to mention all the scoop hounds, storytellers, and assorted factotums who ensure the papers themselves wind up on stands and driveways each day, like they’re supposed to. But newspapers need to change, too.

“The news industry has long found its place in the world deciding what people needed to know that day, and then providing that,” the WSJ report notes. “But over the past 20 years, the world has moved from an era of information scarcity into an era of information overload.

“That has fundamentally changed the way people consume news and information. It has also fundamentally changed the way many content companies create … As Clarence W. Barron, an early owner of our company, said, ‘Everything can be improved.’”