Gawker
The Wall Street Journal, in its guided tour of the newspaper's layout, gives special mention to the A-Hed. This is the front-page feature, once found in the fourth column, now at the base of the third; a home for stories about cooking tips for roadkill or the disappearing holes in Swiss cheese; and the most prized slot in the business newspaper, giving "free rein to our reporters’ imagination." The Journal's writers had better save it for the weekend.
Robert Thomson (the publisher brought in from the UK by the newspaper's new owner, Rupert Murdoch) has flown in the paper's senior editors from its American and international bureaus to break some bad news. Saturday's weekend edition will get an additional two pages, for features, we're told. The implication: on busy news days, at the very least, the Journal will no longer run A-Hed features.
This isn't wholly surprising. The News Corporation boss has already indicated he wants to take on the New York Times in national news. And some sharp-eyed observers such as Ben Compaine had noted how heavily the Journal covered the news surrounding assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a story it might have left to other less detached newspapers in the past. "What was always compelling about the Journal was Page 1, with stories you would find nowhere else," said Compaine.
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