Murdoch

Posted on August 1, 2007
Filed Under Media |

Rupert Murdoch will own the Wall Street Journal - or as Web geeks might say, he’ll pwn it. That’s a joke reflecting his demonstrated editorial intrusion over the decades with the various news properties he’s controlled - and I’ve been familiar with his style since the curled-lip commentary about him coming from London’s Fleet Street in my youth.

Even so, Murdoch is an interesting player to watch because he’s not afraid to pull rabbits out of hats. To observe his moves in the frontier territories of the Web are endlessly fascinating. Read more about him, his thinking and strategy - especially with regard to his management of MySpace - in this Wired story by Spencer Reiss, His Space.

I’ve decided to include the news media in the Hunter and Associates purview; the rationale is that media is indivisibly part of the Web now; the truth is I’m a bit of a news junkie, so why bite my tongue needlessly?

The good news for you is that I can turn the whole Murdoch-WSJ story over to Scott Rosenberg, a wonderful writer, and co-founder of Salon as well as a veteran journalist. Let’s quote a little bit from his report today on the Murdoch acquisition of Dow Jones and its loyal advocate:

The truth is that most professional journalists in the U.S. have lived in a cocoon for decades. The so-called Chinese wall that separates the newsroom from the business side is typically framed as a noble device for insuring that advertiser cash does not influence news coverage. That’s an important goal. But in practice these walls are only as strong as the ethical principles of those who maintain them. Pair a bullying publisher with a weak-willed editor and no wall will help. - Murdoch, the Journal, and the newsroom diaspora

Rosenberg’s article tells us that Murdoch’s coming is nothing new to the journalist at large, plenty of them in other venues have had to decide if they can abide their owners’ mandates.

Some of these manage to pull off the neat trick of staying afloat and staying ethical; others don’t. But none that aims to pay a staff has the luxury of pretending that it’s not a business. Now the Wall Street Journal’s journalists face the same choice. - ibid

In this day there are many voices chiming into the debate over how professional journalism deals with the rise of the amateur blogger, when really the underlying debate, lo these many years, might have been, how does the ethical journalist deal with the pure-business ownership of the editorial desk?

Instead, we have the burning - and somewhat illusory - question, what defines the journalist versus the blogger? Scott Rosenberg supplies an answer that I can live with, in great tranquility forever. And as he explains, he actually made this answer in a much earlier post, in 2002, little dreaming the debate would rage on beyond it, but here’s his difference between a journalist and a blogger:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

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