The Journal

I've read the Wall Street Journal since college; as a journalism student, I had to read at least one national newspaper, preferably two, and USA Today just wasn't going to cut it for me personally. I liked that the Journal gave me the top news of the day right there in the second and third columns, boiled down to one or two sentences with a pointer to an inside page for the full story. It's an incredibly efficient format.

The Journal has been changing over the last couple years. They added color to the front page and elsewhere. They added a "Weekend Journal" special section on Fridays, then the Personal Journal section Tuesday through Thursday -- reportedly to be able to fit more ads, but these sections also created a place for much of the less businessy material that was previously shoe-horned into the other sections. Just this week they introduced a new weather section, with the thinly veiled connection to finance that weather affects many areas of business, especially commodities markets.

Some see these changes and additions as signs that the Journal is moving away from its business focus. Maybe, but it would only be doing so to meet its audience. The paper is the second largest in the country (USA Today is the first) and if you include paid online subscribers -- as they have just begun to do -- their circulation tops 2 million. Worldwide circulation is 2,661,650. Not all of those people are interested in the daily stock market figures, and the Personal and Weekend Journal sections and the weather report give those readers more of what they've come to expect from other newspapers -- which means they're less likely to turn to another paper for that information, as they would have had to do in the past.

But really, these are not signs of the Wall Street Journal becoming a more standard-style newspaper. Not even if the paper begins printing a Saturday or Sunday edition, as is apparently being discussed. No, the real sign of such a switch will be when the Journal abandons its practice of not publishing on stock market holidays.

Posted by Andrew Huff at November 5, 2003 01:55 PM