The Breaking News Debate

By Chris Roush
March 27, 2009

There’s some serious angst in the newsroom of The Wall Street Journal right now about a memo from managing editor Robert Thomson who urges its reporters to break more news.

Isn’t that what a business reporter – or any reporter for that matter – should be doing in the first place, you might ask?

Indeed, but for decades many on The Journal staff have prided themselves on digging deeply into a topic or a company and then writing a 3,000-word story that provides the big picture for readers. It’s the kind of story competing journalists hate to read because they know it’s quite often the definitive take.

What Thomson has suggested in his snarky way is that the paper’s reporters think less about these big tomes and more about the news that affects the hard core business reader – the stock and bond traders who react to any story.

Maybe I’m an old-fashioned journalist who always got emotional satisfaction by writing something every day, but I don’t see what the issue is for The Journal staff. I think some of them have been coddled for too long.

The job of a business journalist is to provide news to readers that they can act upon. The implication of Thomson’s memo is that many Journal reporters have been sitting on such information to use in a bigger story. They therefore run the risk of that information being provided by another news source before their story appears in print.

More importantly, business journalism is changing. Hundreds of business reporters and editors have lost their jobs – many through no fault of their own – because the media outlets they worked for failed to adapt to those changing times.  The Journal’s reporters need to learn that – even if it upsets the apple cart that they have been working in.

I’m no big fan of Thomson and the new regime at The Journal. I think they’ve changed the paper in ways that will hurt it in the long run, such as the increased emphasis on non-business news. And I worry about the long-term impact of this pronouncement on the longer pieces in the paper that are highly entertaining.

But in this case, I think he’s right. Business journalism has become a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week proposition. Sitting on information that could be valuable to readers puts any media outlet, even a successful one like The Journal, at a disadvantage.

Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism