Whispers emanating from the Journal's parent, News Corp., have the paper on track to lose $100 million this year, says one tipster. That's hard to believe, given the $59 million contribution that Journal publisher Dow Jones made to News Corp.'s bottom line as recently as the last quarter of 2008. But Dow Jones profits fell in both of the quarters reported since, according to public earnings reports. News Corp. didn't give precise figures for Dow Jones or the Journal, but did disclose that all News Corp. newspapers saw combined profits fall 97 percent January through April and revenue fall 24 percent in the three months after that.

The Journal could cut some costs by slicing its ridiculous video army down to one guy, plus a cameraman with a cheap recorder, and maybe a video editor. After all, as Current TV's Brett Erlich has show, it's possible to create some seriously fun financial programming with bare-bones production values. Or the Journal can just keep imitating cable news networks, even to the point of absurdly saying "we're running out of time," as the host did toward the end of today's "AM Report." After all, it's not like News Corp. owns a real financial net of its own, or anything.

UPDATE: Dow Jones says it uses "less than 10 staffers" to make the video, and Business Insider has updated its post to reflect that assertion, adding it got its earlier number from "people involved in the show."

The index is actually "in a sales process... earlier stage," Carney reports. If someone completes a buy of the index, it certainly won't be for its informational value; the Dow was born 113 years ago with just 12 stocks and still has just 30. It's been surpassed by several indexes tracking thousands of stocks, weighted to reflect reflecting the entire market.

No, the Dow's value is in its media ubiquity — in newspaper, television and radio reports, even online, it remains the favored way to summarize market gyrtions. The free branding is of limited use to Murdoch and his also-ran Dow Jones Newswires, and would be worth more to competing financial information services like Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters. But if they buy and rename the index, it will inevitably become less popular. If CNBC or the New York Time is going to have to introduce readers to a new index, why not switch to a high-fidelity one not run by a direct competitor?

So the DJIA might go to a Bloomberg-type company, or just sell for cheap as a free advertising play — "OfficeMax Industrial AverageTM" here we come! But the real competition will be in the scramble to replace the average. S&P 500? Wilshire 5000? Russell 3000? Whatever, so long as business news is just that much more boring.

Gawker has learned that Hinton will not be hopping across the pond to help explain revelations that reporters for the News of the World and the Sun, two Murdoch papers under his purview when he ran News International Group, engaged in rampant wiretapping and that News International paid off victims to the tune of $1.6 million in exchange for their silence.

The wiretapping scandals first broke in 2007, when Hinton was running News International. After News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman was convicted of tapping the phones of various royals and their entourages, Hinton told the House of Commons' culture committee that he had thoroughly investigated the charges and assured Parliament that Goodman was acting alone. Last week, the Guardian reported that nearly 30 News of the World and Sun reporters were engaged in wiretapping and other invasions of privacy.

According to the *ahem* Wall Street Journal, the committee has invited Hinton back to explain the discrepancy:

A parliamentary committee that monitors media policy — the lower house committee on culture, media and sport — plans to hold hearings into the matter as early as Tuesday. The committee has invited Les Hinton, the current chief executive of Dow Jones and the former head of News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper operations, to give evidence. A spokesman for Mr. Hinton declined to comment.

Hinton won't be taking them up on the offer, a source tells Gawker. Tomorrow, the committee will begin hearings on the affair with testimony from an editor and reporter for the Guardian, which broke the story.

New York Times editor Bill Keller has been practicing his jabs and left hook for some time. He called Murdoch's Journal "New York Times lite" at a staff meeting in February. This month he was quoted in the Nation musing on the rival paper's "identity crisis:"

If the paper has made up its mind what it wants to be, it's not clear to me... I really miss the long, well-told narratives and ambitious investigative projects. [The Journal's editor] decries that kind of journalism as a self-indulgence...

The Journal's managing editor Robert Thomson is feuding a bit harder, edging toward the bare-knuckled combativeness of his corporate siblings at the New York Post and Fox News.

Here's a memo he sent to staff earlier today. Along with the chart above, it's supposed to prove the Journal caters to the sort of active, engaged readers who pick up the paper on the newstand. USA Today and the Times, meanwhile, are for the non-sentient.

If this all reads like something out of a reality television show, well, maybe that's for the best: young people seem to pay far more attention to those types of programs than to newspapers. To change that, the industry might just have to borrow some tactics.

Which only makes sense, since Wall Street doesn't seem to have much of a future. Since News Corp. bought the newspaper last year, it has been expanding coverage of general-interest subjects like politics and sports. Sure, Journal publicists are milking the market-meltdown story for everything it's worth. But in the long run, it can't be healthy for a business newspaper to see its core readership disappear.

So Thomson is set on stealing other newspapers' readers. At a recent media conference, he mentioned L.A. and Chicago as markets he'd like to take on, as those cities' dominant dailies shrink away to irrelevance. (The Huffington Post, too, has made plans to expand in Chicago. Who knew Chicago was so interesting?)

His plan for increased local coverage would seem more impressive if the Journal hadn't tried expanding regionally in the '90s and failed. But hey, he's only been on the job a year! Institutional memory is for oldtimers.

(Photo via PaidContent)

With 15 minutes left in the trading day yesterday, Dow Jones ran a mistaken report that (almost singlehandedly) erased the day's gains in the DJ Industrial Average:

General Electric's stock fell 4 percent in the last minutes of trading, only to end down 1.5 percent at $19.20.

Dow Jones reported that General Electric's Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt said GE aims at keeping 2009 profits at the same level as this year, even if revenue drops 10 percent to 15 percent.

But after the closing bell, Dow Jones corrected their story, saying that GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt had not forecast 2009 profit to be flat.

The news service said Immelt had been speaking hypothetically when he told a business group in Spain that he would ask his managers to maintain profits even if revenues at their businesses fell as much as 10 percent to 15 percent.

That's from Reuters, and there are plenty of other reports in dozens of other outlets about this major reporting screwup. So, what does the Wall Street Journal—the flagship paper of Dow Jones—have to say this morning about yesterday's late selloff in the market?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down 74.16 points, or 0.8%, at 8990.96. It was up more than 290 points and down nearly 175 points within the last 15 minutes of trading.

General Electric was a catalyst in the late-day swoon, finishing down 1.5%.

The late-day market selloff reflected a "sell the rallies" mentality in the stock market, said Todd Steinberg, head of equities and derivatives for the Americas at BNP Paribas. After Tuesday's rally and gains Wednesday afternoon, "stocks got back up to levels where people were comfortable selling," he said.

We'll translate that: Nothing! The WSJ had nothing to say about how its own company's fuckup led to this rapid selloff of GE "in the late day swoon."

And that's how you try to sweep an error under the rug, unsuccessfully.

IAC CEO Barry Diller has a ghastly track record of launching projects in-house; almost every vaguely promising Internet property he owns, he bought from someone else: Ask.com, Match.com, CitySearch, and so on.

And personal finance sites are deadly. In trying to break the mold, FiLife managed to be even more condescending than most. Its introduction:

Most personal-finance sites are snooze-filled, sometimes schoolmarmish affairs. Save more money! Don't you dare go out to dinner! Suffer, scrimp, suffer, scrimp. We're kind of tired of that approach, and we reckon you are, too.

Watching Wall Street's meltdown, would you be surprised if 20somethings were uninterested in qualifying for a mortgage and investing in mutual funds? Personal-finance sites are usually more motivated by luring advertisers than readers. The former are now in scarce supply, too.

It's actually true, as the memo states, that there is "no better time" than the current Wall Street panic to hand-distribute copies of the Journal throughout London, thus advancing editor Robert Thomson's internationalist ambitions. But perhaps this observation could have been kept close to the vest.

The memo:

DOW JONES NEWS
Read all about it
Market Turmoil Provides Hook to Sell U.S. Journal in London
September 17, 2008

The turmoil in the world's financial markets has provided strong copy and headlines for The Wall Street Journal.

So there was no better time to distribute copies of the U.S. edition - with its well-sourced, insightful and visually compelling coverage of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch and AIG's scramble for cash – at key transit points in the City of London today.

A big thanks to volunteers Adam Ezro, Nilam Vekaria, Peter Jennings, Suhki Bhuta, Arash Hamrahian, Danni Smith and Etienne Bauvir who joined Anne Hogarth and me during the City rush hour yesterday morning to distribute nearly 1,500 copies of the paper, complete with retail vouchers and subscription offers.

Thanks also to Anne, Mike Elsas and Cedric Hamerlinck for the faultless organisation and execution at such short notice. Undoubtedly, the exercise has raised further awareness of the WSJ at a time when our coverage is in a class of its own.

Tim Lafferty
Director of product sales and marketing
Dow Jones Consumer Media Group EMEA

Our tipster's reaction:

I thought this piece of company news pasted below was especially crappy, given the gravity of the economy's teeter-totter and the fact that lives depend on the outcomes. Apparently the paper's reinvention involves cackling over the snapping bones and spirits of the very Wall Streeters who've given us our stories. Yayy capitalism journalismism.

Unsurprisingly, there's already signs of trouble. MainStreet has lost its launch editor, Caroline Waxler, amid a change of editorial direction. FiLife has ratcheted back its once-lofty ambitions. And WalletPop? One of a bevy of websites launched by AOL, which is desperate to find readers who are not turned off by that once-magical, now-deadly three-letter brand. With few prospects for attracting an audience or advertisers, will they not soon need financial advice of their own?

News Corp. made a deal with Digg.com at the end of last year. Users who click through to a WSJ.com story from Digg get to bypass the pay wall entirely. Similarly, when users click through from sites like Google News and Drudge Report, the pay wall is skipped.

Why do this? By making it easier for casual readers to find Journal articles, Murdoch gets more readers. If they like what they see, they can get all the WSJ content they want for a modest fee — and it's likely cheaper than all the direct-mail come-ons the Journal's circulation department is used to mailing. Murdoch gets to have his cake and eat it too. The Financial Times did something similar last year when it allowed readers to get 30 articles a month free before forcing them to cough up some dough.

The scheme falls apart, though, if people just read WSJ.com for free because they can. Courtesy of Manjoo, here's how:

• Search for the headline of the story you want in Google News. Frequently the story will already be there and clicking the search result will get you to the full story.

• If you're using Firefox, download the refspoof add-on. It allows you to fake out the WSJ into thinking you've clicked a link on Google News or Digg. Last year, Digg and the Wall Street Journal formed a partnership where any WSJ story that gets linked on Digg bypasses the pay-wall. By spoofing WSJ's servers, you can access any story for free.

What about Salon.com, the outfit that pays Manjoo's salary? To read the deeper parts of Salon, readers must either pay a monthly fee or watch a brief full-page advertisement — known as an "interstitial" — every day. Everyone needs to make money, but it can be annoying to readers. Since Manjoo passed on telling readers how to bypass it, we'll oblige.

The quick and easy way: *bookmark this page. Hitting that link will give you a "SItePass" for the day, leaving you to browse Salon all you wish. Perfect! However you do it, there's one unanswered question: Why are you reading Salon in the first place?

*deleted:Immediately click "skip" in the top-right hand corner. You'll get a free day of Salon without dishing out anything except a few seconds of time. If even that annoys you, you can use the same techniques Manjoo recommends for the Journal's site: Search articles from Google News, or download a Firefox plugin.

Portfolio gets the first extended interview with Bancroft in its new issue, and starts off trying to present the situation as "what you don't know about this young woman who may actually be more qualified than you think," but quickly acknowledges that, no, the girl has no clue.

"I'm not just some idiotic girl in pigtails yodeling," she says. Rather, she is opera-singing. Natalie's self-described list of qualifications for her board seat on the multibillion-dollar media conglomerate?

Ticking off her qualifications to serve on the News Corp. board, she points out that she grew up in Europe, has a flexible schedule (she commutes to Milan for voice classes every few weeks), and sleeps only three to five hours a night. She also says she is multilingual and routinely reads foreign-language newspapers. Instead of being intimidated by the accomplished men who will be her colleagues, she says the prospect thrills her: "I have a much easier time understanding men. I was a tomboy. I love camping. I love sailing. I love doing boy stuff."

Watch out, Murdoch.

[Photo via Portfolio]

I remember walking past a photographer's open car trunk and noticing that he carried a well-preserved but very dead bird among his cameras and lenses. The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He'd perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans' cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame.

In 1979, one reporter got the idea of flying over refineries and tank fields to look for evidence of gasoline hoarding. As the editor running the coverage, I asked my bosses for approval to hire helicopters or small planes for a story. The answer: Go right ahead.