War at the Wall Street Journal (35 page)

A
FTER BRAUCHLI LEFT
the paper, Thomson initially tried to tread lightly on the news floor of the
Journal
and keep up the appearance that he was searching far and wide for a replacement managing editor. Resentment in the newsroom toward Brauchli—who had left his post quietly with a chunk of money in his pocket—was palpable. In his first move as the "acting" managing editor of the paper, Thomson held a series of meetings with reporters and bureau chiefs to make himself the friendly face at the head of the newsroom, the calming influence who would offer clear communication from on high. It was a direct response to criticisms that Brauchli didn't communicate anything, even as the paper's expectations—of its writers, its editors, and its own readers—were transformed.

In that spirit, Thomson gathered in the last week in April with the reporters from the paper's "Money & Investing" section, the squarest, most buttoned-up of all the paper's cliques, the group that became passionate about arcane
Journal
articles the reporters across the newsroom floor in the "Weekend" section used as stuffing in their Prada boots after a rainstorm. They were the core of the paper. At any other paper in the country they would have been relegated to a business-section ghetto. At the
Journal,
they were the hard-nosed experts. They were also an exceedingly nervous bunch.

Perhaps for these reasons Thomson started with them. The reporters gathered in a conference room. The meeting started off with a bitter irony. Thomson discouraged the attendees from taking notes or making recordings. He was excruciatingly aware of the press the
Journal
received and didn't welcome unauthorized leaks. Nik Deogun, the group's chief, who had proved himself able in guiding Thomson through the
Journal
's minefields, introduced Thomson. He hadn't prepped Thomson entirely in
Journal
sensitivities, however. Thomson started off with a series of slights that would leave an imprint.

"I think a journalistic culture based solely on one story or two stories in the paper today is skewed in the wrong direction," he began. "Journalism is a lot more complicated and a lot more diverse than that. And I think people have to be doing several things, several types of stories at the same time. And that's a challenge, but that's a challenge every journalist around the world at every news organization is facing." He was referring to the paper's "leders," the Page One feature stories
Journal
reporters spent weeks if not months reporting and writing before handing them off to the paper's legendary Page One staff. That group of editors existed in an unapproachable ivory tower in the corner of the newsroom, quiet and removed. Leders were the main measure by which reporters were judged. Failing to successfully produce them—and in relatively large quantities—could kill a career. Hitting one memorable one could have the opposite effect in that it would allow the lucky (and talented) reporter to coast, as some occasionally did, for months after the publication of a noteworthy effort. The vast majority of the staff fell somewhere in between the career-ending and career-making Page One existence. They also broke news on a regular basis, producing in-depth feature stories in their downtime while they were waiting to have their calls returned. Juggling both types of stories was not a new notion for the paper's reporters. That Thomson thought so was a sign of how little he had become acquainted with the newsroom over the past four months since the acquisition had officially closed and he had become the paper's publisher.

His impression of the
Journal
had been forged during his years as the editor of the U.S. edition of the
Financial Times,
when he had a crack mergers-and-acquisitions reporter who beat the
Journal
on a series of stories. But the scoops may well have not happened at all, so little attention did the
Journal
pay them—or at least that was Thom
son's impression. When the
Journal
did follow the stories, it failed to credit the
Financial Times.
Such arrogance enraged him.

Even so, he had made quite an effort to be noticed back then, booking his writers for television appearances and enjoying the additional attention the
FT
was getting through its marketing push. A series of Dan Aykroyd television spots for the
FT
sought to soften the paper's stodgy image in the United States. Thomson had a flair for self-promotion and a competitive spirit, two aspects of his personality that must have attracted Murdoch early on. Now he was here at the
Journal,
where he was once utterly ignored, at the helm of a newsroom that would no longer brush him aside.

His audience got immediately restless. "I don't understand," piped up one reporter seated around the conference table in the meeting. "I mean, Marcus left for a reason. He wasn't doing what you wanted him to do. But I still don't have a clue what you're going to do now that he wasn't already doing."

Thomson quickly brushed aside the question of Brauchli—"History will reveal what happened last week with Marcus, but he behaved extremely professionally"—and got to talking about the changes he wanted to make. "A year ago we were looking at something called 3.0 and that was about how headlines would start with the word
how.
We've reversed that now. That is a very fundamental change." He kept returning to the theme: "You will learn that there will be strategic change. And it will be change where you all are participating in the debate, the news desk, or the bureau chiefs." He went on, "I can't be specific, but it will be change of quite a different sort from what people are used to."

The meeting continued, and reporters asked him whether
Journal
reporters would become wire service reporters (the answer was a resounding no) and how the front page was going to change. Then came a question that was close to Thomson's heart. "One of the things we worry about a little bit in the newsroom is that we're being sent forward into a U.S. version of the
Financial Times,
" said an unsuspecting reporter. "I was wondering how you see us vis-à-vis the
FT
and how you see the
FT
."

The question gave Thomson a chance to expound on his—and Murdoch's—belief that British papers were more competitive than Amer
ican ones and therefore better. The
Journal,
by developing an acute sense of itself, didn't concern itself with bridge collapses in Minneapolis; that was what the other papers were for. Murdoch wouldn't tolerate that. "In 1998 and 1999, the odd thing was the people at the
Journal
didn't feel enough pain," Thomson said. "They thought, 'We're the
Wall Street Journal.'
" The choice of dates would have been meaningless to the assembled crowd unless they remembered that those were the years Thomson was running the
Financial Times
in New York.

Thomson continued, expounding on why the
Journal
should be more ambitious in its coverage: "Why should the
New York Times
own international coverage?" he asked. He then outlined for the reporters how to be more receptive to pain: "Journalists should be nervy. Journalists should be edgy. If journalists aren't nervy or edgy they're in the wrong profession. You need to wake up every morning wondering if someone's stealing your story. That's part of the culture that's inherent in the profession, or the craft, depending on how you define it," he said. He told them the paper was poorly organized before he arrived: "One of the problems previously was that you weren't quite sure where to find stories in the
Journal.
It's more manageable now at the paper. You know where to find things."

Deogun, who had been at the meeting but largely silent, weighed in from time to time. He provided backup evidence for Thomson's assertion that stories in the
Journal
were too long. Dow Jones had conducted research recently that showed that only 40 percent of the readers of the "Money & Investing" section turned past the front page of the section to read beyond the jump. "So," he said, "that's pretty sobering."

The meeting continued, with the resentment growing on both sides. Finally, Jim Browning, a union activist and a veteran
Journal
reporter, spoke up. "I apologize, and I hope I don't sound disrespectful, but I was dumbfounded a few minutes ago to hear you saying that you felt that people at the
Journal
didn't feel they competed with anybody, and that people felt that stories that hadn't appeared in the
Journal
hadn't been written about. I have to tell you that maybe I'm lying, but I think if you talk to Nik or Mike or to Ken [the group's leadership] or any other people who have helped edit the news we put in the paper, if you ask them, they would take issue with that. I would take strenuous issue with that. In all the years that I've been here the credo of the paper has been that if we aren't first with all of our news, then something is very, very wrong. And if somebody is scooped on a significant story here, I can assure you that for many, many years since 1979 when I joined the paper, and I think for many years before that, we all felt—" He paused, clearly exercised. "I mean, I just wonder where in the world did you get that notion? Anything we can do to sit down with you and discuss that thought, we'll do, because my worry is that if people are making decisions on the theory that there was a lack of competitive vigor at the paper, and that the people running the paper and the people reporting the news didn't feel competitive every day, well, what worries me is that may be a misconception. Did I misunderstand you or...?"

Thomson jumped in. He had to stop this rant or it would overtake the entire discussion. "Well, I wasn't talking about the vast majority of the paper. Look, I had noticed this when I was competing with the
Journal
when I was in midtown. I certainly did not mean to cause offense." Thomson was talking quickly now. "That is exactly the right attitude that the
Journal
should have, and I know a great many people do, but there were people here that didn't share your passion or share your concern," he concluded in an attempt to defuse the tension. "And it certainly wasn't meant to be a characterization of any individual or any department, but more a general warning about the need for competition, frankly, in an age of ultra-competition." The meeting couldn't end quickly enough at this point. "Thank you all very much," he said. "I think you've put out a great paper."

If Thomson tracked the coverage of the
Journal,
he was none too pleased by the report on the gossip site Gawker the day after his meeting with the "Money & Investing" section. "Civil War at the
Wall Street Journal
" the headline read, outlining the most explosive parts of the meeting and delivering a who's who of the inside players in a newsroom that was wholly unaccustomed to such attention.

Nik Deogun, according to Gawker, was a "potential quisling," and Paul Steiger "was beloved but is now being talked about like a greedy bastard." Steiger's wife, Wendy, was pictured with a screen grab from her "bosom-revealing blog." The gossip may have been shrugged off in a newsroom more inured to such darts, but the
Journal
had al
ways labored outside a certain media glare. How exciting could gossip about stock market reporters be? Now, with a dash of Murdoch, even a small editorial meeting was noteworthy. The mean-spirited glee took
Journal
folk by surprise.

After one such article in this period that suggested Thomson was not just the acting managing editor but the permanent head of the newsroom (an observation obvious to any but the most wishful of old-school thinkers), Thomson e-mailed deputy managing editor Bill Grueskin late on a Sunday night and asked him to call. As the man in charge of the news coverage at the paper, Grueskin was the closest thing it had to a nominal leader. Thomson wanted to assure Grueskin that he wouldn't interfere with the running of the paper while he was only acting managing editor. "Believe me, if I were managing editor, you'd know it. I'd be in there every day," he said, a message meant to be reassuring but one that had, in the end, the opposite effect.

A week after news of Brauchli's departure broke, Thomson's figure appeared in Grueskin's doorway, holding a mock-up version of the next day's paper with a hand-drawn bar graph Thomson had sketched just moments before. The graph displayed the day's news of newspaper circulation for the past six months among the country's largest papers, a data set that had been released earlier that morning by an industry group. The data indicated that among the top ten newspapers in America, only the
Wall Street Journal
and
USA Today
showed modest increases in circulation, while the rest of the papers' circulation numbers continued to slide. Newspaper circulation figures were dutifully reported in the
Journal
every six months. The story was the same almost every time, ran between five hundred and a thousand words, appeared on the inside page of the paper, and was greeted with little more than a shrug of resignation from the editors and staffers who paid attention to it at all.

This Monday afternoon, Thomson was energetic. The bar graph he had drawn, which on its
x
axis tracked the rate of growth of circulation and on the
y
axis listed the nation's largest papers including the
New York Times,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
New York Daily News,
and Murdoch's own
New York Post,
showed the results, which framed the meager growth of the
Journal
in a positive light only through comparison with its peers. "Even the
New York Times
was down," Thom
son enthused to Grueskin, taking obvious glee in the pain of the
Journal
's main competitor. Thomson suggested the graphic could run on the front page of the paper.

Grueskin, a thirteen-year
Journal
veteran, was a no-nonsense, glib newspaperman with a dry wit. He knew there were a lot of close ethical calls a newspaper editor would be forced to make on any given day when determining how to cover a given news event, but this one—the question of whether to trumpet the
Journal
's own good news on the front page of the paper in contrast to a competitor's misfortune—wasn't even close. This was a
New York
Post-like tactic of self-promotion, he thought, one that belonged in the realm of the marketing department, not the paper's newsroom. He told Thomson his opinion (omitting the dig at the
Post)
and directed him to the appropriate person in the marketing department who might handle such a matter. After a brief quizzical look, Thomson retreated from the office. The exchange was perfectly pleasant, but Grueskin kept Thomson's scribbled chart, in case the difference of opinion became more complicated. Two days later, Thomson returned with a copy of the day's paper with a full-page color ad touting the
Journal
's rise. Grueskin would resign from his job a month later.