Another Hit to the Newspaper Industry

I have worked in finance for the better part of the last six years and have often found The Wall Street Journal to be at the top of the pyramid of financial and economic reporting. I used to have a daily subscription to read during my commute to work, but decided not to renew it last January because I felt they were moving too far away from their core business, which was, you know, business.

With the takeover of The Wall Street Journal by News Corp. it became evident quite quickly that the paper would never be the same.  The move away from in-depth business analysis to highlighting world news and weekly editorials by Karl Rove made me question why I was paying to read the news I already knew about thanks to the Internet and The New York Times, which I also read regularly (online, of course).  The introduction of the sports section later on made the paper even less critical as a morning read because the sports they were “reporting” on was nothing new.  The paper claimed it was a different way to cover sports, a new style of covering it to show readers what small intricacies they were missing from their normal sports reads.  In reality, they were giving us information about sports that we didn’t care about and they failed to convince us that we should.

While I ended my subscription to The Wall Street Journal, my father continued his.  I knew that my dad read this paper every day and lived by it as his map to the business issues of the day.  He has worked all over Wall Street and has settled in investment banking for the past few decades.  He remains an industry veteran to this day and is an easy spokesman for a business executive and enthusiast.  Why do I bring up my father in this case?  Because of an email I received from him last week, which read:

I’ve been a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal since 1965; yes, 45 years.  I’m still very active in commercial activities, but have canceled my subscription because the newspaper and the website are no longer integral to my business life…

Dad

If my father no longer believes that The Wall Street Journal is integral to his business life, one of investment banking at present, then the paper has clearly gone too far to compete with entities it used to care nothing about.  Ultimately that is the problem with The Wall Street Journal; it used to produce news and analysis that no one else could match and now they are simply struggling to duplicate what is already out there…and is already struggling to stay alive.