The Wall Street Weekly Reader
I let slip in an earlier post that I used to work for The Wall Street Journal. It was a great place to work back in the day (over ten years ago now). In order to undertake a new project, I simply had to provide justification to my supervisor and resources magically appeared — no endless review committees, no hand-wringing. Just a quick yea or nay and we were all set.

Prior to going to work for the Journal, I had been an occasional reader. I was fresh out of college and didn't understand much of what I read, but the more I read the more I understood. Funny how that works! One of the best perks of working for the Journal is that there was a stack of free papers in the lobby and you, as an employee, were expected to pick one up and read it. Preferably first thing, because there was no worse sin at the Journal than dealing with a customer or vendor and having them mention something in the paper that you weren't aware of because you hadn't read it. People's BS detectors are pretty good about things like that.

Another really nice thing about working for the Journal is that pretty much everyone has heard of it. It certainly helped me deal with various procurement issues when I mentioned where I worked.

I was working at the paper when they made the huge change and began accepting color ads in the paper. It was a change that management agonized over. After all, the paper didn't even print pictures of article subjects — they used stipple renderings (engravings, really) of important people. People used to assume they were done with a couple of clicks in Photoshop, but they actually took a staff of artists a significant amount of time to create. So the notion of putting color ads in the paper was kind of a big deal. The decision was made, the big day came and no one cared. It was the same paper, except the ads were now in color.

I'm afraid that this change emboldened management. Somewhere in the Word Financial Center (a scary place on 9/11 with the World Trade Center across the street) it dawned on some bean counter that newsprint is expensive. I'll bet they said that if we are going to make more money in an environment where circulation is stagnant or in a decline, ad rates and buys are flat, and subscription costs are about as high as they can get without hitting a scary tipping point, we're going to have to cut costs. So several quiet rounds of bloodletting began. I heard from former coworkers who got the squeeze. That, apparently, still wasn't enough.

Then I heard the unthinkable — the paper was going to get the squeeze. The Wall Street Journal was no longer going to be a six-column broadsheet newspaper, it was going to be a five-column THING. I put the thought out of my mind, after all it was really too absurd to contemplate.

Then I saw it last Friday. I don't know when they first released this abomination into the wild, my readership having waned as prices and piles of unread papers grew, but there it was. It looked like a stack of lonely Weekly Readers abandoned in the Business School. But, no, it was the nation's business daily reduced to a cheap crossbreed between our old weekly grade-school newspaper and a new $10 bill. It was small and the colors were odd. I picked one up and I picked up a copy of the Michigan Daily — the student campus newspaper. THE DAILY WAS BIGGER THAN THE JOURNAL!

I see it now on street corners. Gaunt, not even able to fill in the whole display window on its vending box — a shadow of its former self. How long before even what little that now remains is gone?