Wall Street Journal

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 1:58pm on Monday, June 15th, 2009

U.S. advertising spending fell 14% in the first quarter of 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 11, 2009:

"U.S. ad spending on media such as TV, print and online display ads fell 14% to $30.18 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to TNS Media Intelligence, despite guardedly optimistic talk in recent weeks about a bottoming out in the market.

The numbers, which exclude categories such as online-search ads and in-store ads, suggest that the ad downturn is far more pronounced than many expected. "We are now in the record books with the worst quarter in a decade," said Jon Swallen, TNS's senior vice president of research.

TNS, an ad-tracking firm owned by WPP PLC, said a recovery in the media business may take time. "So far it looks like second-quarter spending is starting pretty much the same way the first quarter ended. There are hopeful signs of general economic indicators bottoming out, but the advertising sector still appears to be lagging behind," Mr. Swallen said.

The Internet was the only medium to see growth. Online display advertising, which includes banners, was up 8.2%, TNS said. Other researchers have signaled that digital advertising has been less insulated from the recession. Last week, PricewaterhouseCoopers said U.S. online-ad spending fell 5% in the first quarter to $5.5 billion."

The full story:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124467774162404243.html

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:00pm on Monday, May 11th, 2009

News Corporation is planning to use "micro payments" at the Wall Street Journal web site, Reuters reported on May 10, 2009:

"News Corp is planning to introduce "micro payments" for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal's website, WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson said on Sunday.

"It's a payments system -- once we have your details we will be able to charge you according to what you read, in particular, a high price for specialist material," Thomson said in an e-mailed response to Reuters questions."

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 12:05pm on Monday, April 27th, 2009

So how is the Wall Street Journal doing with Rupert Murdoch in charge? Scott Sherman offers his assessment in the article "Has the 'Journal' Lost Its Soul?" published in The Nation on April 22, 2009 (May 11, 2009 print edition):

"...a great many soothsayers had predicted that Murdoch's ownership would have regrettable, if not catastrophic, consequences for the newspaper. Murdoch stoked those fears: he joked with Time in June 2007, six months before he concluded his $5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones & Company, owner of the Journal, that he would put tabloid-style photos of half-naked women in its hallowed pages--provided those women had MBA degrees.

But the wrecking ball has not come to the Journal; sleaze has not invaded its pages; the most dire fears have not been realized. Murdoch has not extinguished quality writing at the paper; he has not transformed the China coverage to benefit his business interests in China; he has not terminated the paper's superb coverage of art, photography, music, dance and theater; he has not murdered the "A-hed," the quirky feature that has adorned Page 1 since 1941; and so on. Says Byron Calame, a deputy assistant managing editor of the Journal who went on to become public editor of the New York Times from 2005 to 2007: "I'm not aware of any corruption of the news standards."

But the Journal has changed in very significant ways. Quite a few Journal watchers--including many people who left the paper but continue to care deeply about it--are reading it with disquiet and unease. They see a newspaper whose coverage of the financial crisis, while impressive in many respects, lacks analytical rigor; a newspaper that is running shorter articles; a newspaper whose copy-editing standards have declined; and a newspaper that is abandoning a rich tradition of long-form narrative journalism."

The full story:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090511/sherman

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 12:24pm on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Rupert Murdoch prefers power to money, which is a good thing given that his purchase of the Wall Street Journal was a financial disaster, according to Nicholas Lemann in a terrific New Yorker article. From April 13, 2009, the article about media moguls is titled "Paper Tigers:"

"It was a deal-making triumph—and a financial disaster. Murdoch overpaid, taking on debt to do so, just at the moment that both the newspaper business and the financial sector upon which the Journal depends for advertising were about to plummet. NewsCorp stock traded at twenty-one dollars a share on the day the Journal sale closed, and is under eight dollars today. That’s thirty billion dollars of lost value. In February, Murdoch announced an $8.4-billion write-down, a good chunk of which is attributable to the Journal, and in the last quarter of 2008 his company lost $6.4 billion."