El WSJ se lava la cara

Gordon Crovitz, publisher de Wall Street Journal, adelantaba en una conferencia de la Inter American Press Association (IAPA) algunos de los cambios que introducirá el diario a principios del 2007. Así lo cuenta Mark Fitzgerald en Editor & Publisher :

While the Journal has managed to keep its circulation flat for the past decade -- something many other top-25 circulation papers have been unable to do -- Crovitz acknowledged those numbers don´t tell the whole story. "I think the quality of that circulation, it's fair to say, is of less quality. We´ve gone more into bulk (sales), we've become more aggressive in finding ways for people to sample our paper."

The paper's core audience of top businesspeople, those so-called "C-level executives," have become leading adaptors of new technology. They told Journal researchers they want online to work better with print, and they wanted a paper with better navigation -- and with type that was easier to read.

Much of what the Journal will introduce in January is nothing new, Crovitz acknowledged. The web width will shrink to the standard industry broadsheet. Pages and pages of detailed financial listings will be replaced by what Crovitz called "a state-of-the-art" Markets Data Center.

Print readers will see even less recounting of yesterday's events from a newspaper that prides itself on explaining the impact of news it figures its audience learned before bedtime.

The long-running Page One summary of news called What´s New will be replicated throughout the newspaper to summarize, for instance, quarterly financial reports.

In its last redesign, the Journal changed little in look or content, and a person awaking from a coma that began in 1941 would see an almost unchanged newspaper.

"The product lifespan of that newspaper was 50 years," Crovitz said. "The product span of this Journal is not going to be 50 years. It´s not going to be 10 years. It'll be closer to 5, or maybe closer to 2 or 3."