A Requiem for the Culture of The Wall Street Journal

Mourning the brutality of the current purge

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

I spent more than 20 years working in and around the Wall Street Journal—first as an outside lawyer, then 15 years on staff, ultimately as the assistant publisher, finally as the biographer of Barney Kilgore, the inventor of the modern Journal. So the very unusual culture of the Journal, as I experienced it in the last two decades of the last century and the first of this one, did a great deal to shape my journalistic values, and has a special place in my heart.

This week I want to talk about how that culture seems in the process of being demolished, to explain what I mean by that, and to try to indicate why I think it’s important.

First, a bit of history. When I worked at Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company then and now (I left in 2004), the senior executives generally agreed that the worst thing that could possibly happen would be for the paper, which everyone in publishing seemed to want to buy, to be acquired by Rupert Murdoch.

Midwestern roots

Dow Jones had thrived under the leadership first of modest Midwesterners, an astonishing number of whom, from the 1920s through the 1960s, were graduates of the same Indiana college, DePauw. The company was a place where titles were always rendered in lower case, where leaders were people who rarely used the first person singular, where voices were hardly ever raised, where the news was played straight, and where the views of the editorial page were forthright, consistent over decades, ideological but nonpartisan—and never bled into the news pages.

Barney Kilgore shaped the modern Journal.

Murdoch was the antithesis of pretty much all of this, and when anxious owners and greedy and frightened new managers sold him the company in 2007, I figured everything would change. Some things did: the front-page stories that had been the most distinctive feature of the Journal were abandoned because, as Murdoch’s principal henchman said derisively, they “had the gestation of a llama,” and the paper became less editorially distinctive over all. The editorial page became partisan rather than ideological, and supported politicians who adhered to the party line even if they betrayed the principles (including free trade, lower deficits and liberal immigration) it had once championed-- but that, one has to admit, had begun before the takeover. Murdoch meddled a bit on the news side, but less than than one might have expected.

Overall, there was also much less staff turnover than you would have guessed; many key roles continued to be occupied by people brought up professionally under the ancien regime, and the newsroom culture mostly purred along. Murdoch permitted himself to be talked out of abandoning the Journal’s pioneering paywall. The newsroom had its bumps, but it remained a generally happier place than most, particularly most in New York.

One exception on turnover came in the top job, now glorified as “editor-in-chief” where once “managing editor” had been enough. In 16-plus years under Murdoch, the paper is now on its fifth top editor (including one Brit and one Australian with no previous Journal experience), where in the last 30 years before the takeover, it had had just three, all of them Journal veterans.

A brutal purge

In the last 14 months, and with the advent of the most recent of the editors, things have changed rapidly, and brutally. The editor-in-chief, managing editor (now the number two role), two deputy editors-in-chief, the editors responsible for enterprise and investigative stories and the Washington bureau chief have all left their posts, almost all of them abruptly. Every one of them had begun at the paper pre-Murdoch, most well before. More recent arrivals also departing in this seeming purge have included the standards editor, the visuals editor and the top editor in Europe, all of them regarded by the veterans as very much in the traditional cultural mode.

Midwestern can be cool (McQueen was from Indiana too)

But it’s the way this was done, rather than the sheer scale of it, that has alarmed me most. Most of the firings have been brutal, pointlessly so. Staff members with decades of loyal and effective service have been peremptorily dismissed, many forced to leave their offices within a matter of hours. The last two years of the tenure of the previous editor were marked by almost open warfare with the publisher, and ended with more than a month in which the editor was left publicly hanging after he had apparently been privately defenestrated. The managing editor, a 37-year employee, seems to have had a week between notice and exit from the premises. Such was the haste that one of the deputy EICs’ departure was announced while he, after 25 years of service following graduation from DePauw, was at home with COVID.

Then, a few weeks ago, the hammer came down at the Journal’s Washington bureau. The bureau chief had already been dispatched, apparently after pushing back on cuts. News of impending layoffs came first from competing publications; two mornings later, three managers arrived from New York, convened a five minute meeting to say that emails would be forthcoming at the stroke of Noon to those affected, turned on their heels, and left. In the event, some of the emails were a bit late.

In relatively few of these cases have those doing the firing had the courage to do it face-to-face. When, in 1997, we had to close a new business unit shortly after launching it, the then CEO of Dow Jones insisted on telling the angry staff in person, and listening to their anxious questions and furious complaints. I’ve never forgotten the simple grace of that. It’s not the way Dow Jones is run anymore. A request for comment on all this to the current editor didn’t receive a reply.

Why it matters

Let me be clear in all of this. I am not saying that new editors shouldn’t have the prerogative to bring in new associates. And public companies will sometimes face irresistible pressures to cut costs. Nor am I saying that all of the changes being made are substantively misguided. The anomaly of a separate copy desk in Washington, for instance, should almost certainly have been eliminated long ago, maybe even in my own time as assistant managing editor 30 years ago.

What I am saying is that treating people in newsrooms callously is always wrong, and that institutions where this happens repeatedly become coarsened and brittle. Editors and managers who behave badly, or even those who tolerate others doing so, are unlikely, at least in my experience, to possess the empathy that marks much of great journalism. That is to say, newsrooms which are run with arrogance and disregard ultimately will number their readers among those whom they betray.