Inside baseball’s navel
I’m as much of a media wonk as anybody, but the Times outwonked me today devoting an entire story to the Wall Street Journal changing the name of a section from Pursuits to Weekend.
Who could possibly give a damn? And why would they?
What’s even more amusing is that this news comes from anonymous sources, as if this really is some delicate corporate secret.
The change would mean the newspaper will put out a Weekend Journal section on both Friday and Saturday and a Personal Journal section on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. According to one person close to the company, who like others asked not to be identified because the comments were not authorized by the paper, Dow Jones thought the previous names for the leisure sections were too confusing.
In the midst of the Murdoch story did everyone get just too accustomed to covering every burp out of Dow Jones? Is somebody waiting to use this as evidence that Murdoch is dumbing down the Journal (”Pursuits,” after all, sounds so much classier)?
I hope the Journal gets the scoop when the Times gets around to changing its cutesy shadowed “Eating In/Eating Out” logo. Now that’d be news.
Tags: newspapers
August 29th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Funny! Nice post - sometimes it’s very easy to forget the needs of your customers when you’re in as insular a business as this one.
August 29th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Jeff, you let me down. I clicked on it expecting to read something about baseball.
August 29th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
I remember when Collier’s did a whole issue on Look changing its masthead design.
And who can forget the tempest over American Heritage switching from hardbound to softcover?
August 30th, 2007 at 8:04 am
How right you are. While it’s sensible to cover a genuinely big media story like Murdoch buying the WSJ, the *exhaustive* lengths of coverage over every little detail of the deal and its sequelae reveals just how convinced the Times is that *anything* that changes the look/feel/format/perceived editorial slant of the Journal is Really Big News Worth Covering In Great Depth.
*sigh*