I asked former Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger what he thought of the Journal launching a New York metro report next month."Rupert Murdoch is a billionaire and I am not," was his first reaction to the News Corp. chairman who confirmed the plan Tuesday. "When I was there, we did regional sections and we had a lot of fun with them. I suspect the folks at the Journal will do it on a much bigger scale and I will be eager to see how it turns out."
Steiger, who headed the Journal newsroom from 1991 to 2007, is now editor-in-chief of ProPublica.com. -- Joe Strupp
Those regional sections were discontinued because they cost a lot of money and WSJ's ad rates for them were lower than those for national ads. The economics are not different now. Ownership is, though.
ReplyDeleteActually those regional sections were profitable, selling local ads at local rates for local circulation.
ReplyDeleteBut the regional pages ate into the full press run. They were killed before the ad recession began in 2000, when the Journal was forced to turn away national advertisers.
Managemeent killed the regionals because they figured they could make more money selling full-run ads at national rates. That was all before new presses and when Journal management thought the national ad market would go on forever.
Within one year of the closing of the regionals, the company was struggling. And it never recovered. If it had held on to the regionals, things might have been better.
That said, the NY section is a no brainer. If former management had any imagination in that regard, the Bancrofts would still own the place.
It will be interesting to see which reporter/editors he hires.
ReplyDeleteIt's ProPublica.org not ProPublica.com...
ReplyDeleteit will be very amusing to see what they do, it not as if the world will come to an end if they do not hire anyone, its all monopoly and being a king in the industry and they are nothing more!!!
ReplyDelete