Wall Street Journal Redesign Ups Stakes in War for Business Readers
Important Details: With the New Year, the Wall Street Journal launched its re-ordering of its flagship print and online properties. Readers saw the tangible product changes, the result of more than a year of planning. It began with Dow Jones fundamental leadership shifts and then in its announced staff reorganization. The thinking in place and the structure in place, the new Journal, skinnied down physically to meet Dow Jones New Year’s resolution of lowered expense, arrived. The Journal’s 1.7 million print readers noticed the smaller page size — the iconic 6-column format has been reduced to 5 — and numerous changes in content and stock data. Beyond the immediate, honey-they-shrunk-the-Journal moment, the Journal encouraged its print readers to see the changes this way:
- "We want to be your all-day-long source of business news." That’s the guiding principle of the changes, summarized in the publisher’s column by Gordon Crovitz, head of the Dow Jones Consumer Group, and the prime mover behind the changes.
- The print paper, which will carry 10% less news space than last year, is intended to tell readers "what the news means."
- The Wall Street Journal Online, now reaching 800,000 paid subscribers, is intended to tell readers "what’s happening right now."
- A new Markets Data area provides expanded and enhanced stock listings and data. The new online access allows the print Journal to cut back on the amount of its printed daily data, and to focus it more around market trending.
- A new Video Center offers video, broken into News, Analysis, Opinion, Pursuits (Lifestyle) and Special Reports. Beyond standard news interviews, the Journal is testing some named features, like "Cache It or Trash It."
- More extensions of traditional content, with podcasts, blogs, commenting, RSS feeds and mobile accessibility all heightened.
- The addition of some new content, in trendier sectors like intellectual property law and the business of law.
- Letters have moved off their very traditional home — the editorial page — to the inside of the Marketplace section, to the cheer of editorialists and chagrin of the reporting staff.
Readers could see the new plan’s first test in the coverage of the resignation of Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli in Thursday’s paper. The print paper aimed for the "how" story of the departure — a "how" top headline has appeared most days this week — while online the print edition added four Home Depot vs. Lowe’s charts and opened up the stories to reader comments, drawing dozens, though making limited use of sister Marketwatch’s related content.
In Outsell’s Opinion: The print shrinking is as metaphorical as it is physical. It’s a recognition, long in the works, that the world has changed. It’s easy to be critical of the changes — the print/digital, what/why handoff is uneven; the lack of non-Dow Jones content limits usefulness; the sinking feeling that indeed less is less. But Outsell believes the changes are a necessary step in the right direction. Take the changes as the beginning stages of a new publishing "platform." Platforms have seemed nebulous to print publishers. They are the combination of content management systems and presentation systems, all aimed at getting good stuff to all those wide and niched audiences. The Journal’s moves begin to create a new platform, one aimed to rock and roll with its changing readers.
Execution is one thing — and plainly a work in progress. The ideas, though, are required study for everyone in the news industry. How exactly has the Internet revolution changed readers’ expectations of immediacy, and of analysis? What of the Journal’s changes is applicable to daily newspapers, to radio stations and to TV/cable news outlets? Outsell believes the changes are real and that the applicability is immediate as well. Some of this is about the content, about writing differently for different audiences at different moments. But it is also a lot about presentation: how publishers offer their wares to customers. To that regard, design guru Mario Garcia’s explanation of the changes, and their why, is worth a newsroom seminar in and of itself. Use it to start a debate about your own paper, show or website. (You can find Garcia’s comments by clicking on the Readers Guide pdf link here; it’s maddening, and too characteristic of newspaper websites, that you can’t find his column written for the Tuesday paper by doing a search on the site itself!)
For Dow Jones, the changes show that it knows it is not living in a vacuum. You can compare this first round of market data changes, for instance, with Google Finance and Yahoo Finance. Both offer better interactive charting, more news from more sources, more commenting, more relevant blogs. That comparison is important. As Dow Jones moves forward with its changes, it will be severely tested. In the digital marketplace — and this week’s changes show how quickly business journalism is moving online — we’re in the run-up to a war for lucrative business readers. For Dow Jones, the question is how well, and how quickly, it can marshall its WSJ, Barrons and Marketwatch divisions in that war with Google, Yahoo, Conde Nast, Time Warner and the Financial Times, among others, all competing for the top two or three positions. Consider this week’s Journal move an early skirmish.