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November 22, 2008 10:31:49 CST

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Murdoch's Journal Wins Back a Fan

Posted Jun 15, 08 8:08 PM CDT in Business,  Opinion,  Arts & Living 

(Newser) – Rupert Murdoch's attempt to make the Wall Street Journal the "first read" for elites, rather than playing second to the New York Times on non-financial stories, looked like a recipe for disaster to Jack Shafer. It was likely to result in me-too coverage crowding out the Journal's signature reporting, he wrote earlier. Now he says he's pleasantly surprised. Not by the new stuff, but by the continuing strength of what the paper has always done best: financial enterprise reporting.

"Stick your hand in your recycling pile for a Journal, and I guarantee you'll come up with a winner," Shafer writes in Slate. "Maybe the Journal seems refreshed because the primary wrap-up has largely evicted political news from Page One, and into that vacancy has dropped what I consider the good stuff," he writes, citing a piece on Bear Stearns' demise and another on Countrywide's sketchy loans to political types. Or "was the good stuff there all the time, but I just wasn't noticing it?"

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Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp, addresses a crowded Wall Street Journal newsroom after his takeover bid was accepted in December.   (AP Photo)
Copies of the Wall Street Journal are displayed at a printing press in London, in the early hours of Wednesday April. 16, 2008.   (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
"It was swinging hard again in its traditional wheelhouse to produce great enterprise journalism," Jack Shafer writes in Slate about his newfound appreciation for the Wall Street Journal.   (AP Photo)
Jack Shafer, in Slate, writes that he figured Rupert Murdoch would blunt the sharp instruments of the Wall Street Journal in his much-publicized attempt to unseat the New York Times.   (AP Photo)
News Corp. chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch emerges from a meeting with key members of the Bancroft family, who controls Dow Jones & Co., Monday, June 4, 2007 in New York.   (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)
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