The Walkley Foundataion an Alliance Initiative

Rupert Murdoch’s decision to launch a US$5 billion takeover bid for The Wall Street Journal in 2007 unleashed one of the decade’s great bouts of angst and hand-wringing. Murdoch never really likes being criticised, and had some exchanges behind closed doors over the coverage. But he didn’t complain openly, except for a little sensitivity about the suggestion that he was a genocidal tyrant. You know his critics meant it in a nice way, but he felt they had gone too far.

To Australian eyes, the depth of feeling the takeover stirred was sometimes hard to appreciate. The US media portrayed the deal as a battle for the future of journalism. His detractors focused on Murdoch’s style of reporting; his supporters saw him as perhaps the last media tycoon with a total commitment to newspapers (and, at the time, to free content on the web).

Michael Wolff covered the takeover in his book The Man Who Owns the News (Vintage Australia, $27.95). But while his account has a lot about Murdoch and quite a bit about Michael Wolff, he doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of running newspapers except to make it clear that he and Rupert both hate The New York Times.

Sarah Ellison starts from the opposite premise in War at the Wall Street Journal. She doesn’t know much about the Murdochs, but she has everything that Wolff didn’t have about the Journal. That’s what makes it such compelling – and indeed essential – reading for journalists.

A decade ago when I was writing the US edition of my Murdoch biography, I became an intense online reader of American business journalism. At the time Robert Thomson, as editor of the US edition of the Financial Times, claimed rather grandly that the Journal excelled at covering “midsize companies doing midsize deals in the Midwest”, while the FT was designed for a more sophisticated reader.

I found the FT’s US media coverage was snappy; they chased stories hard and had quick turnaround times. They heard a report and you found out about it as a breaking story. The Journal had a far wider brief, so seemed more cumbersome. But when it turned its gaze upon a subject, it usually blew away the opposition. The FT was good, but when the Journal was on message it was in a different league.

The Journal was famous for its lateral-thinking front page, with its whimsical “A-Hed” feature in the middle. Geoff Winestock, now with the Australian Financial Review, once wrote an A-Hed about the French love for the bunting, a small,very rich bird. The act of consuming it is so messy and indulgent that for the sake of decency it is traditionally eaten with a towel over one’s head.

More than the A-Hed, it was the “Tic-Toc” that defined the Journal – the fly-on-the-wall reports that became the authoritative history of major events. Ellison’s book is an exemplar of this time intensive
and costly style of reporting. Some would portray it as the Journal’s last great Tic-Toc.

First the downside. Ellison doesn’t really know much about Murdoch – an intriguing aside refers to a former Australian rugby captain travelling as a personal trainer with Rupert to Herb Allen’s famous Sun Valley media conference back in 1998. He is more likely to have been there for Lachlan or James.

She’s not strong on the finances, but that’s a minor flaw. And the nature of her subject means she is forced to spend many chapters describing the agonies of the Bancroft family – the Journal’s original owners – over what they should do as Murdoch’s News Corporation comes knocking.

This is a family you need satellite navigation to keep track of. Frankly, they’re a silly lot and for Australian readers there’s not a lot of interest in how they stuff it all up, with substantial help from what seem to be highly conflicted advisers. Short version: hopelessly dysfunctional, cashstrapped family with desperately shallow notion of noblesse oblige meets Rupert Murdoch carrying money. They’re candy.

The first half of the book reads slowly, with classic North American newsroom English (Warren Buffett is “legendarily wise”, newspapers are always “storied”). But at some point the drama in the newsroom revs up, particularly after Murdoch takes control and Thomson makes his return to US journalism as the Journal’s publisher. This is where the book gets hard to put down, for these really are the issues about the future of journalism. Here it’s not just about online futures and pay walls, but about two competing and robust systems of reporting.

The takeover coincides with a switch to the Methode production system, a multimedia platform currently being installed at the AFR. The online shift calls for different news priorities.

Ellison labours to explore whether the Journal’s reporting has shifted to the right. Such things are difficult to prove one way or the other. Even Murdoch’s most strident critics have not tried to claim he has ruined the Journal as they feared. The Tic-Tocs are not what they were, but many say the product has improved with a conventional news-driven front page and snappier coverage, as Murdoch takes on The New York Times.

Ellison’s account has a lingering sense of discomfort and puzzlement. The worst she can say is that Thomson’s changes have left the paper good but no longer great.

It might be comparable to The Sydney Morning Herald being turned into The Australian. The paper would improve in some areas, it would lose in others, but the product would not be the same. Some will like it, some won’t. [As a personal disclosure, after a decade I’m currently letting my online WSJ subscription lapse. It’s not because it isn’t a good paper, but becoming more generalist to take on The New York Times makes it less useful for me.]

This is what makes Ellison’s book so important. The nature of our craft is changing, in terms of media, product and the whole reporting environment. She has written a moment by moment account of how part of this unfolded at the heart of an American icon, and how some of the most talented people in our industry faced that change – some better than others, as it turned out. But as an inside story of a storied American newsroom, this is perhaps as good as it gets.

War at the Wall Street Journal by Sarah Ellison, published by Text Publishing, RRP $34.95.

Neil Chenoweth is a Walkley-winning author and journalist for The Australian Financial Review

Joanne Brooker is a freelance illustrator. She has just returned to Melbourne after a stint in the Middle East, and is available for commissions