The
Wall Street Journal was a great paper. It is still a pretty great paper but it is not the great
Wall Street Journal. That former paper, with its particular look and feel and characteristically myopic focus on business and finance, has departed the stage, replaced by a vigorous, strong-minded paper focused on equal parts business, politics and public policy, and great events of the day. To that, its owner for almost two years now, Rupert Murdoch, is now adding a specifically New York focus.
Murdoch is a singular fellow and a simple one. When he bought the
Journal he said his plan was to compete with the
New York Times. Many people thought that this was a battle cry or market view. He wanted the
Journal to take readers
and advertisers from the
Times. Almost nobody thought he wanted the
Journal to
be the
New York Times.
It is curious, to say the least, to see personal obsessions play out in the business world. Murdoch announced the quarterly results for his company, News Corp, yesterday. They showed dismal prospects for his newspapers everywhere in the world. And yet he is not to be dissuaded from the notion that newspapers provide the meaning of his life and the purpose of his company and that the
New York Times, as the greatest newspaper the world has ever known, must be conquered if his ambitions are to be fulfilled.
In this quest, Murdoch is Ahab. His obsession is as single-minded and his reason and sanity (at least his business sanity) are as much at issue.
The
Times is not just the greatest newspaper but it is, too, for Murdoch, the greatest voice of the liberal world. Destroy the
Times, destroy infuriating liberalism, too (and maybe liberalism won’t be so infuriating to Murdoch, quite a bit more sensitive than he lets on, if it isn’t always making him out to be such a dirty dog).
Since he bought the
Journal he has been strategizing
about how he could buy the
Times as well. As the financial fortunes of his own company have sunk over the past year or more, not least of all because investors have punished him for his newspaper love, and as, again and again, he has been told of the barriers he’d have to surmount to get the
Times, he has become more and more determined to simply convert the
Journal into the
Times.
It’s a simple calculation on this part: He can afford to be the
Times more than the
Times can afford to be the
Times. And damn his shareholders: If he wants to publish newspapers right up until the moment of their extinction, he’ll publish newspapers.
Indeed,
his announcement the other day that the
Journal is going to staff up in its effort to produce local New York news is an extraordinary, if inexplicable, development for the city’s unemployed journalists. (Murdoch, the great defiler of journalism, has now become its great savior.)
This is as quaint as it is mad, and, in its way, heroic, if also futile, too.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NewserColumns.
