Rupert’s a wolf, but not big bad wolf
Somehow, I just can’t seem to get worked up about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal.
The takeover, which was hammered out Wednesday after three months of wrangling between Murdoch and the various family members who owned the Journal’s controlling stake, has caused much hand-wringing in journalism circles. (One WSJ editor has already declared he’d quit before working for Murdoch.) But when you consider how many self-inflicted wounds the industry has sustained recently, it’s hard for me to develop a sense of outrage over this one event.
If anything, journalists should be buoyed that somebody was willing to pay a premium for a newspaper property. That hasn’t happened much lately.
Newspaper publishers and editors have long been two-faced creatures when it comes to their place in the world. Newspapers were a business when times were flush and most dailies enjoyed a monopoly in their markets. The money rolled in, 20 percent margins became the expected haul, and executives collected fat bonuses. But now that the business tide has turned, journalism people have morphed into different creatures: Suddenly, they’re the selfless guardians of a public trust, and newspapers are too important to society to be buffeted so rudely by economic storms.
But that economic storm is at least partially of the industry’s own making. Newspaper executives have been their own worst enemies over the past 15 years. In the early days of the Internet, they invested stingily in technology and treated their own web sites as a grudging business expense, rather than an opportunity. Even when web sites like Craigslist emerged and newspapers’ classified-advertising sections began to make their wholesale migration online, industry executives still didn’t hear the wake-up call. They continued to block access to their web sites by demanding that visitors register to get in, and continued to charge money for classified ads that people could post online for free. Now, the classified sections of newspapers have been hollowed out, and competing web sites blossom anew every day. Duh.
By now, the reality of the changed business has finally sunk in. That’s why we’ve seen a huge wave of job cuts and reorganizations in newsrooms all over the country as industry executives try to catch up to all the tectonic shifts they ignored for ten years. It’s ugly and wrenching. I saw it first-hand.
That’s why I can’t muster much sympathy for a WSJ editor who declares he won’t work for Murdoch. At least he has a choice.