Wall Street Journal News Product Plummets, Now Daily Fishwrap

Ink Stained - Insider essays chronicle the death of
The Wall Street Journal's journalism after Murdoch

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation took over the The Wall Street Journal's parent, Dow Jones for $5.6 billion in 2008, the writing was splattered on the wall.

The Wall Street Journal's tradition of in depth, investigative, analytical and explanatory pieces as exemplified by its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 1987 market crash was soon to fall, just not as fast as the stock market indices during the 1987 and 2008 crises.

Now, the Wall Street Journal is just a couple of steps up in quality journalism from the New York Post, also owned by Mudoch's News Corporation.

Ann Davis Vaughan, former Wall Street and investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, in a new book writes an essay that "pulls the curtain back on the inner life of The Wall Street Journal’s newsroom since Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. took over the paper’s parent in early 2008," notes Dean Starkman in the Columbia Journalism Review's piece on the new book, Ink Stained: Essays By the Columbia University Graduate Journalism Class of 1992, on sale today at this link.

And behind the curtain in the post-Murdoch The Wall Street Journal's newsroom isn't pretty.

The Murdoch-imposed news product is what we would expect from an ideologically-inclined, Soviet-style outfit.

The Journal's editorial page, that text has always been expected to be infused with madness, but most readers just ignored it and checked out the analytical and explanatory work.

Starkman concludes his piece on Ink Stained:

Many fine reporters and editors have left the Journal since Murdoch took over. In fact, they could fill the top editorial ranks of a couple of newsrooms—and basically do at Reuters and Bloomberg.

Only, one, however, has spoken up. That’s Vaughan, who has nothing to gain but a dose of Internet grief.

She deserves credit. The smart response is to give her some.

And to buy the book.

Readers interested in the world economy—as a competing topic to NBC television's The Voice—would benefit from analytical and explanatory reporting such as Davis Vaughan and the old Wall Street Journal's.

You know, like how do computer trading, advanced mathematical techniques, milliseconds and speed of light in the placement of computer terminals 100 feet from each other relate to the possibility of a future crash that might destroy $10 trillion in wealth give or take?

Anything the population of the world can or should do about such matters?