I am so sick of Gretchen Morgenson’s incessant whining in The New York Times' Sunday Business section that I’m ready to poke my eyes out with some of the paper’s advertising circulars.
The Times‘ Sunday business section has always been “The Anti-Business Section,” employing the Times’ predictable, anti-establishment, “go underdog!” directives: Businesses are evil, executives are crooks, directors are blind, and investors are victims.
Aside from a few, rare columnists, like economist and humorist Ben Stein—who, not coincidentally, is speaking at Compliance Week’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., June 6-8—The New York Times Sunday Anti-Business Section is clichéd, unenlightened, and sometimes unreadable. “All The News That’s Fit To Print” is a laughable and passé maxim for the paper; it should read, “Some Of The News That Fit Our Opinions.”
I’d cancel my subscription, but the paper’s perpetual arrogance is a constant reminder for me to remain humble and unbiased at work and at home. “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods,” wrote the Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein.
Ain’t it the truth.
Anyway, I’ve found Gretchen’s repetitive droning about executive compensation to be particularly annoying. Almost every week, she recounts the individual exploits of some overcompensated executive, or details the inequity and malevolence of overwritten instruments-of-evil like golden parachutes. Unfortunately, she’s usually just regurgitating the research of firms such as Glass, Lewis & Co., or she’s exhuming old and easy targets like Richard Grasso or Robert Nardelli.
Either way, her pompous and disdainful treatment of corporate executives is getting tiring, although I’m sure her condescending sermons are loved by her editors at The Anti-Business Section.
A great columnist talks to her subjects, not down at them. And a great newspaper lives with the world, not above it.
The Death Of The Wall St. Journal
The Wall Street Journal was the best business newspaper on the planet, and I mourn its death every morning.
My grief is the result of two unfortunate—dare I say imprudent—WSJ management moves.
First, the Journal has decided to become a consumer product, not a business newspaper. This is a trend that started nearly a decade ago, when health and personal finance coverage began encroaching on business news. It moved into second gear with the launch of the Journal’s “Personal Journal” section. Then, to further juice advertising revenue, the Journal announced enhancements it would make to the paper, mostly in the categories of “Home and Family” and other “core areas including cars, gadgets, and travel,” with the goal of “accelerating the momentum the Journal has built in consumer advertising over the past two-and-a-half years.”
Core areas of cars and gadgets? Well, so much for the business coverage; in February, the paper’s parent company, Dow Jones, hammered this point home by creating a new organizational structure that placed the Wall Street Journal as the anchor of its “Consumer Media” segment.
Of course, the proof is in the advertisers; the morning this editorial was written, the advertisers in the Journal included nothing but consumer brands: Armani, Infiniti, Alpha Omega, Mercedes, Tiffany, Land Rover, United Airlines, Acura, and HBO’s “Addition” series. Great brands for an affluent readership, but they’re not exactly business advertisers for a business newspaper; in the front section, there was exactly one business advertiser: the state of Ohio (“Build your business. Love your life”).
The world’s self-professed “leading business publication” is a consumer rag.
But that’s only the first reason why I mourn its death. The second reason is equally depressing.
Earlier this year, the folks in charge made the most awe-inspiring strategic error in the history of newspaper journalism: They changed the unique broadsheet layout of the Wall Street Journal to a smaller, more “standard” size. In keeping with the consumer theme outlined above, the paper was redesigned so it would appeal to a wider array of consumer advertisers and so the paper could save a few bucks on printing—$18 million per year, according to the company’s latest 10-K. That may sound like a lot of money, but for a company with $1.7 billion in operating expenses in 2006, the savings yield only 1.07 percent.
And the damage far offsets the savings.
The paper looks like a shadow of its former self—a toy-like miniaturized version, no more inspiring than The Boston Globe or The San Francisco Chronicle or any other pathetic daily left dying in various corners of the country (the fact that WSJ management felt those papers were a model to which they should aspire is downright laughable). Altering the newspaper’s most unique characteristic would be analogous to Apple re-architecting the iPod to look like a Walkman, or Google redesigning its home page to look like Yahoo. It would destroy the essence of the product. It would be crazy.
Yet that’s exactly what happened to the Journal.
Ironically, the smaller layout is actually less appealing to advertisers, not more appealing: Advertisers are ostensibly forced to pay 100 percent of the price for 80 percent of the newsprint area. But advertisers aren’t stupid; if you chop off 20 percent of a billboard, you can’t expect to charge the advertiser the same rate. And the proof is in the numbers: After a slight jump in ad revenue that coincided with the highly promoted January redesign, February ad revenue plummeted 10 percent. The decline in print ad revenue continued throughout the first quarter of 2007, with equity research from firms like Lehman Brothers predicting future deterioration.
So much for the advertising argument.
More importantly, the paper has violated the promise it made before it unveiled the redesign: maintaining the level of award-winning coverage that made it so great in the first place. My favorite section, Marketplace, for example—which I used to look forward to every morning—is ostensibly empty. In today’s edition, there were seven paltry articles in the section, not including a few briefs and annoying excerpts from other publications as rehashed in the Journal’s “The Informed Reader.” (Note to Journal editors: If I wanted to read The Chronicle of Higher Education, I’d subscribe to it.)
All businesses eventually get commoditized. The intrinsic value of Ford may have originally derived from its unique manufacturing process, but that was nearly 100 years ago. Now all car makers share advanced car design and manufacturing systems. In contrast, as New York University’s Stern School of Business professor and intangibles guru Baruch Lev wrote in a 2004 Harvard Business Review article, “Permanent profits and shareholder value are created by intangible assets, which by their nature are unique to the enterprise.”
Newspapers are no different than automakers; in fact, there’s little that is unique about newspapers today. They are the ultimate commodity, with wire copy, standardized layout, pooled photo resources, and market consolidation yielding miserable, homogenous rags.
The Wall Street Journal was different. It had an intangible secret sauce: its business aura, its physical hulk, its corporate focus, its editorial excellence, and the kingly stature that was its essence. Now that’s gone.
The king is dead, and I mourn him daily.
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