What does matter, according to “The Man Who Owns the News,” is his third wife, Wendi Deng, who is 38 years his junior and controls him to the point of reading his e-mail.

(“Let’s recast this story as a triumphal, even uplifting tale of pluck and achievement,” Mr. Wolff writes, about how she came to marry such a powerful older man. “She’s not Becky Sharp, she’s Pip in ‘Great Expectations.’ ”)

That little detail about Deng resonates especially strongly since it reinforces the picture the Journal painted of her in 2000 (original) as a deft and serial manipulator of powerful men:

Her ticket out of China came in 1987, when she met a Los Angeles couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry... Mrs. Cherry says she had grown increasingly suspicious about Ms. Deng's relationship with her husband. Mrs. Cherry recalls discovering a cache of photographs her husband had taken of Ms. Deng in coquettish poses back in his hotel room in Guangzhou. Mr. Cherry confirms he had become infatuated with the young woman...

The Cherrys divorced, and Jake Cherry married Ms.Deng in February 1990. But that union didn't last. Mr. Cherry says that about four months after the wedding, he told Ms. Deng to leave because she had started spending time with a man named David Wolf...

Former colleagues describe Ms. Deng as having been adept at juggling the interests of News Corp.'s various units, which like to operate independently... She is said to have shown no hesitation about walking unannounced into a senior executive's office to discuss the latest Chinese entrepreneur she had met or government official she had contacted...

In early 1998, she first appeared at [Murdoch's] side, acting as his interpreter when he traveled to Shanghai and Beijing. By the summer of 1998, the Star TV staff was buzzing about romance between the pair. After dinner meetings in Hong Kong, they were observed holding hands. In May, Mr. Murdoch had separated from his wife of 31 years, Anna. The split surprised even his closest aides, who say they hadn't seen any sign of a rupture.

Can't wait to see how the book is reviewed in the Post and Journal!

DiFranco played a song about Barack Obama! Also, something off her newest album. Owner Rupert Murdoch was not around, probably because he ran home to get his tie-die and water pipe and got caught in traffic, or so we like to imagine. We also like to imagine DiFranco acoustically reformed some of those right-wing vulgarians on the editorial page, but we'll settle for the folksinger stealing some column inches in Weekend Journal from one of those wretched articles on how to buy a private jet or whatever. It's not clear how large DiFranco's audience was or where, exactly, her performance took place, but newsroom staff could hear it.

The Journal describes Emanuel as being "combative with a business audience." He wouldn't say they'll give the unions everything the unions want, but he wouldn't say they wouldn't either. He pinned the blame squarely on the assembled corporate types, of course, for fucking over the middle class for twenty years.

"When it gets rough out there, a lot of business leaders get out of the car and say, 'We're OK with minor reform.' I'm challenging you today, we're going to have to do big, serious things," Rahm Emanuel said, speaking to The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, a conference convened to elicit corporate opinion on the challenges facing the new president.

AND:

Mr. Emanuel promised that a major economic stimulus would be "the first order of business" for Mr. Obama when he takes office Jan. 20. The focus of spending will be on infrastructure, specifically "green infrastructure," which he said would include mass transit, upgraded electricity transmission lines, "smart" electrical meters that allow consumers to save money by using electricity at off-peak hours, and universal broadband Internet access, which he said would encourage telecommuting.

Hooray, hard-charging enforcer Rahm is telling off those fatcats! The rest of the Obama team is not so aggressive, but this seems as good a window as any into what the first couple honeymoon months of the Obama presidency will be like. Soak the rich! However few of them remain! We demand blood! Or at least health insurance, that'd work too!

This syndrome is partly occupational hazard, since reporters and editors spend so much time talking to real business people who like to flatter with effusions of how brilliant and right on their analyses are. No one has been more of a poster-boy for the yearning to cross the editorial-managment divide than Kansas, who signed up in 1999 with Jim Cramer at TheStreet.com first with an editorial tile and then more venerated monikers like Executive Vice President and Chief Strategic Officer. At one point, his stock in the company was worth $9 million, but even more importantly it was the sort of gig that could position him for management positions down the line. But the dot-com crash wiped out the paper money and Kansas was soon back at the WSJ again, editing stuff. Last year he left again to run FiLife, taking the title of president. We can't blame him for trying to make the jump: editorial employees are being laid off left and right, and even the superstars in the field are looking burnt out and less special every day. Maybe next boom, eh?

Newspapers are still among the best media businesses... no competitor in local markets has held onto audience as well as newspapers have...

We certainly have competition from Google and others. But in each of the communities where we compete, almost every newspaper has the largest news staff, largest sales force, biggest audience and greatest share of advertising in its market. Whether it's on the Internet or off the presses, we are capturing that business.

...Simply put, more people want our products today than wanted them yesterday; this is hardly the profile of a dying industry.

After Pruitt published that op-ed and completed his company's acquisition of Knight-Ridder newspaper group, his company's shares fell to less than $2 from $48.

Of course Murdoch has faith in newspapers. That's self-evident. Like Pruitt when he published his op-ed, Murdoch's just made a huge investment in the future of newspapers. Hopefully he's right! And hopefully he can really cement the public perception of newspapers as "news [readers] can trust" by not sweeping his company's stock-moving errors under the rug so often, and getting the name Canada straight. They're little things, and to a certain extent unavoidable, but they add up.

(via)

Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to announce that Gerard Baker is appointed Deputy
Editor-in-Chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. Gerry has
had a distinguished career as a journalist at the BBC, Financial Times
and The Times of London. He has reported on subjects as diverse as the
exotica of Japanese politics, the minutiae of monetary policy, and the
frailties of the international financial system.

In his most recent role in Washington as US Editor and Assistant
Editor of The Times, Gerry has been a commentator and reporter, and so
has a clear and principled understanding of the objective of
objectivity. He will bring considerable energy and wit to the Journal,
and assist me in overseeing the transition of the paper, the website
and Newswires.

Our editing troika remain at the heart of the day-to-day decisions, as
do Mike Miller and Alix Freedman. Neal Lipschutz at Newswires will
continue to report directly to me and Alan Murray remains at the helm
of online. Gerry will edit the Journal in my absence and be tasked
with accelerating our development as a national paper of influence and
as an unrivalled international business news franchise.

Gerry, who will take up his new position in January, received a First
Class Honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Corpus
Christi College at Oxford University. His first job after graduation
was at the Bank of England.

From 1988 to 1994, he worked at the BBC, initially as a producer in
London and New York, and then as Economics Correspondent. In 1994, he
joined the Financial Times, where he was Tokyo Correspondent, US
Economics Correspondent, and Washington Bureau Chief and Associate
Editor. Four years ago, he joined The Times, where he also oversaw the
development of the paper's US Edition and its successful American
website.

Robert.

As Slate's Big Money put it, on its WSJ-critiquing Twitter stream, "So...is this an endorsement? If so, it's the world's most tepid."

Very true. The Journal of Wall Street didn't seem ready to lavish praise on the candidate who blamed the economic meltdown on "greed and corruption" on... Wall Street:

If the 2008 election were solely about character and experience, Mr. McCain would be winning in a walk... Mr. McCain's bad luck is to be running in a year when character and experience aren't enough. His party is at a low public ebb and the financial system imploded only weeks before Election Day.

Looked at individually, most of Mr. McCain's economic proposals are sensibly conservative, and some are even bold. They are superior to Mr. Obama's, and if implemented would make a recession shallower and shorter... But Mr. McCain was never able, or willing, to explain the differences. More broadly, he has never explained to fearful Americans how an economy with Republicans at the helm could fall into this ditch.

...Once the panic hit in September, Mr. McCain's penchant for hyperactivity was also less than reassuring...
In this difficult year, Mr. McCain has had the harder sale to make. His admirable personal tenacity has been better than his variable political argument. We'll find out Tuesday if biography trumps hope.

There you have it: Vote McCain and defeat hope.

Also: Never seek an endorsement from the Wall Street Journal.

Of course, it's entirely possible Drudge has had a few too many birthday cocktails tonight and, shorn of inhibitions, decided to let his true feelings shine through, and got a bit sloppy with the facts in the process.

Or maybe he means the WSJ's coverage is just totally in the tank for Obama? Because we're pretty sure Politico doesn't do endorsements either.

[UPDATE: Or, as suggested in the comments, he's talking about the polls from the news organizations, which would make much more sense. This theory doesn't quite explain the graphic — but Matt Drudge being Matt Drudge would.]

Or maybe, as our tipster wonders, Drudge was hacked?

Or maybe he's got a genuine scoop after all. It would be bizarre for the Journal to endorse Obama, after running editorials over the past week tying him to vote fraud, "tax and spend" economics and the "soaking" of small business. But at a certain point in time one might have said the same of Bush administration vets Scott McClellan and Colin Powell.

"Bottoms up" indeed, Matt.

He sees a big problem in that so few Americans now pay any income tax. "We're now at a point where a very large part of the population pays no federal income tax at all. When you have a majority of the population that realizes that you can transfer money from the productive to themselves, that's one of the great questions for the future of civilization, as far as I'm concerned."

(Emphasis added.) The "most people don't pay income taxes" saw is a key Republican talking point in the 2008 election, and a misleading one at that, since a> it's closer to 40 percent and b> virtually all workers pay, directly and indirectly, payroll taxes amounting to 15 percent of wages.

But more to the point, saying the majority of Americans are unproductive is just the sort of thing that's going to prompt customers (like, say, me) to choose alternate carriers when redistributing their own meager (and for the most part declining) wealth this holiday season via Amazon.com and the like.

Smith has secured a brighter future for himself in a hypothetical McCain Administration, at least. Hope it was worth it.

Orwall is four-year Los Angeles bureau chief and a "WSJ Star", in the words of New York, and incidentally the editor of a major story on Rupert Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng. It looked like he had perhaps fallen out of favor when he was passed over for the job of Page One editor, but at Thomson's Journal chief of London bureau may be an even better gig.

One hopes Orwall was careful to build some cushion in his pay package against swings in the pound, now falling by the day. He replaces Emily Nelson, who is headed back to New York.

The memo:

The Guardian shrank in 2005:

The boring old Wall Street Journal shrank back in 2005 too, before, even, Rupert Murdoch swung aboard from his fearsome and mighty pirate vessel.

And the New York Times shrank this summer. (Though, really, things have been shrinking over there for a long while.)

In fact, lots of American papes are adopting the smaller "Berliner" European-style.

Once the tech world starts crumbling too, leaving nothing but angry and empowered robots and a few huddling, gossip-starved masses, look for Gawker to simply be a single string of 1's and 0's—at which, of course, you'll chuckle and say "Oh, ho ho. That Lindsay Lohan v. 7.6! What a card! Do you think she's really an androisexual?"

With a background in features and investigations, Martin doesn't sound like he's part of an agenda to make the Journal's front more newsy and less analytic. But then one never knows!

Insights on the reshuffling? ryan@gawker.com

Odd that the newspaper's Republican ideological allies in Congress, the fiercest opponents of the plan, have more faith in the free market than the Journal itself.

With the conservative movement in such disarray, perhaps Rupert Murdoch needs to stage an unprecedented intervention of his own and refashion the Journal editorial page so people know what the hell it stands for .

[WSJ]

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson must craft and execute the bailout in a way that persuades Wall Street and the global financial system that they will be saved while protecting the American taxpayers’ $700 billion investment.

The Times' finance reporter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, writes frequently from the perspective of business executives and could hardly be called a populist. But his own Tuesday column on the bailout is scathing, going much further than the editorial:

The hypocrisy is thick... the most amazing power grab in the history of the American economy...

There is nothing in the bill that will prevent these problems from happening again...

The sickest part is that Wall Street is lining up at the trough for a piece of the action, lobbying to run some of the $700 billion fund — and take huge fees — for their own mess.

The Wall Street Journal held its fire Tuesday after a lengthy editorial Monday recapping the many alleged ways government intervention has screwed up the economy — and stopping short of applying this lesson the biggest intervention yet.

It took a British paper, the Financial Times, to speak baldly. Like the Times, the paper went after the lax oversight in Paulson's legislation, which literally said his decisions "are non-reviewable... by any court of law or administrative agency." But the paper's editorial also went after the meat of the plan itself, saying it "had deep inherent flaws" in how it will determine prices and concluding with a call for a more powerful "alternative option quite soon."

Paulson is pressuring Congress to accept extraordinary amounts of debt extraordinarily quickly. America's newspapers, or what's left of them, should at least be keeping up. (Or maybe everyone would feel more comfortable leaving the analysis in James Cramer's trusty hands?)

"The steps effectively mark the end of Wall Street as it has been known for decades."

CNBC briefly broke into scheduled feature programming to announce the changes while the Times and Journal are topping their websites with the news.

It looks like this will be another working weekend for frazzled finance reporters.

Can I really figure out the crisis on the internet?
Okay, so not really. On Tuesday Slate's new business site The Big Money posted a story on the next dominoes. Morgan Stanley was not even listed. Morgan Stanley was not listed because no one was talking about Morgan Stanley failing on Monday. Well that was all the way back then, and this is now. So yeah, no one writing on the internet really has a handle on what's happening, but that is why it is so important to figure out who can at least tell you what just happened.

In that vein, do you mean to tell me the systems of the financial capital of the universe made it possible for these guys to not only put up a hundred bucks to borrow five thousand bucks worth of a company's stock in hopes that the company's stock would plunge on account of all the guys borrowing shares with the intention of having it plunge, but to do all of this without even actually borrowing the stock to begin with?
Uh yes? But not anymore because so-called "naked" shorting is being outlawed? Here is how Dealbreaker explained it last month:

It's Saturday afternoon and you stop by your ex girlfriend's apartment to pick some of your old stuff. You guys are friends and all, so you just let yourself in. You're grabbing your clothes from behind the fridge and see that she's got a case of Budweiser sitting in the pantry next to it. You happen to be on your way to a pool party and you know that your frat boy friends will be out of beer by the time you make your "casually late" entrance.

So you "borrow" that case of beer from your ex. That's called the locate, and since you didn't get her permission then that'd be called doing it naked. (Hey, stay focused here and stop dreaming about your ex's great body. I'm learnin' y'all something right now.)

Is there a cool animated graphic that could visually connect my own mortgage payments to all these complex securities that got bundled together and repackaged with so many ever-credulity-straining "terms" that by the time all was sold and done they were worth 22 cents on the dollar?
Well that is not why Si Newhouse created it but Portfolio has a very cool one!

Where is the definitive guide to how the Chinese Communist Party made all this happen when it decided the best way to make everyone forget about democracy was to keep the lives of its citizens improving at a dramatic but steadily controlled rate by getting them all jobs manufacturing stuff Americans could not really afford because they work retail but would buy anyway because of the cheap credit that got us into this mess and anyway, the US Treasury will bail everyone out, because no matter how much they overpay the mercenaries keeping the peace in The Iraq China will always have excess wads cash under the mattress to lend them?
Glad you asked! It's in the Atlantic Monthly of about nine months back.

So are We Turning Communist?
Hey, yes, and the communist country that gave you Jerome Kerviel is totally schadenfreuding at our gargantuan hypocrisy, and the Trotksyists over at the economics blog Marginal Revolution is laughing with them. But Equity Private over at Dealbreaker points out, this kind of inane oversimplification of shit is how we got into this mess to begin with.

I do grow a bit tired of hearing about this or that being "nationalized." You would think a prerequisite for being a member of the "financial media" would be the proper use of the word "nationalization" and its derivatives.

It has almost gotten to the point that "bailout" was at with reference to Bear Stearns. I understand that it is all the rage with the kids these days to bend and twist meaning until all semblance of communication is the same muddy color as brackish harbor silt, but that has to end at some point. No?

I find it difficult not to draw a connection between this sloppy linguistic tendency and the crash. After all, when every corner is rounded off, every edge dulled, every sacking becomes a change to "pursue other opportunities," every slip in revenue a "market harmonization," every crash a "correction," every incompetent failure an "emerging challenge," every takeover a "strategic opportunity" every CDO "Triple A," every auction rate security "just like cash" and every mass firing a "downsizing," how the hell is anyone supposed to know what's risky and what isn't?

Lest you think Equity Private lacks a sense of humor because she resisted the obvious "derivative" pun, you can read her funny guide to translating Wall Street announcements here and laugh at things you don't fully understand too.

Hey, do you think there could possibly be a photo gallery of some of the lesser-known hot babes of CNBC?
The blog CNBC Sucks has one. The blog CNBC Sucks is incidentally awesome! Not least for this endorsement of Barack Obama:

Let me break it down for you. Obama is 47, McCain is 72. If you are 47 or younger, you can expect to live another 30 years. ALL of McCain's policies are based on him being safely dead by the time we starve and kill each other on the streets as a consequence of his policies.

Isn't anyone taking the whole Those Fucking Greedy Banker Douchebags Can Fuck Themselves approach?
Why yes. That is why some nice rich lady edits The Nation!

This is an unfair world. Most of the time, it feels as if there is no God. No old dude with a beard making sure that if two bad things happen to you, then two good things will happen down the line. The amount of suffering in the world is not evenly distributed. Poor people get crushed. Rich people get breaks. Most of us are not destined to be the ones seated inside the fancy restaurant; we're the ones outside on the sidewalk, looking at what's on their plates. So as disastrous as the market crash may be for all of us in the long run, take a minute and enjoy one part of it. Revel in their misery. Toast their unemployment and celebrate their pain!

But you know what, dude? We are just not feeling it today.

*Well, of course you can, that is the whole point.

(Dean Starkman—a Journal veteran now with the Columbia Journalism Review—says this front page represented the day the financial press "capitulated" to the banking crisis. On another note, isn't the woman advertising Dell laptops—"I want to protect my data"—aspiring to the same repressed librarian look that Sarah Palin has so popularized?)

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.

In any case, if you're a subscriber you'll be reminded of it again tomorrow, when you'll have probably forgotten amidst all the other crazyass shit that is already filling the Journal's annoyingly Portfolio-esque redesigned website. Hey look, the SEC is regulating short selling again, good idea! As with the rest of this meltdown, we'll keep you posted on What This Means as soon as we figure out What It Means which is to say don't hold your breath!

*Seriously, who has time to actually be calling about this right now that isn't still drunk? Just wondering.

• The Financial Times wrote of "financial chaos ... high drama ... [that] could lead to one of the most radical reshapings in Wall Street history.... [and has produced] increasingly desperate talks over the... state of the financial sector."
• The Journal added that "Lehman's collapse will send deep and painful ripple effects across the markets."
• The Times: "One of the most dramatic days in Wall Street history.... humbling moves which reshape the landscape of American finance."
• Andy Lynch, a fund manager at Schroder Investment Management in London, in the Times: "Today is the day historians will be writing about in years to come... The only thing that this comes near to during my career is Russia defaulting in 1989. But that was much shorter in time and the world economy was in a healthier state."
• Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC: Said he's running on two hours sleep. Also, while today's events might seem "horrific," "you'll look back and this will be a good thing," this consolidation.
• Someone else on CNBC: There are only two large investment banks standing.
• Another CNBC talking head: "I don't see us emerging from this anytime soon."

Outside Lehman's headquarters in midtown Manhattan, employees taking lunch breaks or a few minutes for a smoke early on Thursday afternoon discussed the firm's future. Many sounded dazed. "It's over, man...unless we get bought out in the next 24 hours, it's over," said a young man, in conversation with someone on his cellphone. He said he was a Lehman employee and declined to answer further questions.

At a fast-food vendor across the street, people waiting to order food discussed the dive in Lehman's share price this week, and the latest headlines from CNBC. Outside, a group of three men, wearing Lehman badges and walking back into headquarters, discussed the fallout for other firms on Wall Street. "At some point, where does it stop?" one said, as he headed back to the office.

Intelligencer worries, in the tradition of journalism ethicists, that the workers might have been talking about something else (Project Runway?). The bigger issue, though, is that the quotes kind of suck. They convey that the workers are dazed and panicked, but any information beyond that is suspect, in particular the "it's over" line from the random Lehman employee on a random phone call. And why use it (as we would!) if you have better-sourced information elsewhere in the story (as the WSJ does)?

Surely the WSJ hasn't lost its grip on insiders at firms like Lehman who could provide a real sense of what's going on. But gimmicky reporting could soon convince people otherwise!

[WSJ via Intelligencer]

*I know, what about Choire, you ask? Maybe he is the Aung Sang Suu Kyi, except that Emily is the one who is into Buddhist stuff these days I hear, and meanwhile Pareene is the real Panchen Lama and I am trying to be Benazir Bhutto. Hahaha and the funny part of this is that I wouldn't have thought up any of this had Denton not told me to "add context to explain who Balk is" and "in general write for a larger audience."

You are blasted, greedy, money-driven executive bitch

You stinkin dementors....you suck all the happiness from the world!!!!

'There is no good and evil. There is only money, and those too weak to seek it.' —The WB

YOU FOUL, LOATHSOME, EVIL LITTLE COCKROACH!

They're not all unreasonable:

I won't lie: Half-Blood Prince probably DID have potential to make more money next summer, than this winter. It was a smart financial move, to be sure. What wasn't smart was the movie you decided to move. This is a Harry Potter movie, for God's sake.

And finally, the best for last:

I hope you choke on your own saliva.

It was just after the 1988 Republican convention ended. I was on the plane, as a speechwriter, that took Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, and the new vice presidential nominee, Dan Quayle, from New Orleans, the site of the convention, to Indiana. Sitting next to Mr. Quayle was the other senator from that state, Richard Lugar. As we chatted, I thought, "Why him and not him?" Why Mr. Quayle as the choice, and not the more experienced Mr. Lugar? I came to think, in following years, that some of the reason came down to what is now called The Narrative. The story the campaign wishes to tell about itself, and communicate to others. I don't like the idea of The Narrative. I think it is ... a barnyard epithet. And, oddly enough, it is something that Republicans are not very good at, because it's not where they live, it's not what they're about, it's too fancy. To the extent the McCain campaign was thinking in these terms, I don't like that either. I do like Mrs. Palin, because I like the things she espouses. And because, frankly, I met her once and liked her. I suspect, as I say further in here, that her candidacy will be either dramatically successful or a dramatically not; it won't be something in between.

But, bottom line, I am certainly sorry I blurted my barnyard ephithet...

There are more inexplicable wrinkles to the story in Noonan's full telling (link below), but the point is: Yes, she thinks Palin is a bullshit pick, and she doesn't mind doing a little bullshit rhetorical dance to try and placate her conservative benefactors without actually backing off her statement.

[WSJ]

Oooooh, how snug indeed, that synergistic Commieloving capitalist News Corp embrace! Nah, for real though: Thomson has a right to be legitimately stoked that his newspaper is just now getting into the "read it at home and peruse it in your leisure hours" business because unlike his pals over at the Times he doesn't have to now endure the wrenching financial fallout of non fetish-inclined old people finally discovering Craigslist. But next time you give a press conference, bro, maybe remember that you're talking to the press, as in the "broke-ass former journalists who have to blog this now because yes, that is what it's come to for most of us" and that a lot of them are past the point of "schatenfraude."

*Ha ha ha, you like how we juxtaposed those two sentences? Anyway, "eschatalogical" may be a little internerdy at this point, but it's still a twelve-Euro word in my book, Bob! (Side note: love what you've done with the bloggy digressions over there, Bercovici!)

All right, he’s not quite a liberal. He remains a militant free-marketeer and is still pro-war (grudgingly, he’s retreated a bit). And there was the moment, one afternoon, when over a glass of his favorite coconut water (meant to increase electrolytes) he was propounding the genetic theory that the basic problem of the Muslim people was that they married their cousins.

Other hints that Murdoch is still an unpolished, rough-and-tumble media mogul: He is a terrible mumbler, has alienated many of his children from his business and likes to personally report dirt on his foes (Wolff observers him trying to nail down gossip about a Hillary Clinton adviser).

But is no longer the unwavering backer of Fox News that he once was. After begging an audience with Barack Obama, Wolff writes, Murdoch arranged a "truce" with the Democratic presidential candidate and Fox News. Also, he's no fan of Fox shouting head Bill O'Reilly:

Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can’t be missed—he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not possible that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.

And Murdoch would "really like to own" that temple of liberal New York respectability, the Times:

Now, everybody around him continues to tell him that buying the Times is pretty much impossible. There will be regulatory problems. The Sulzberger family would never … And then there’s the opprobrium of public opinion.

But it’s obviously irresistible to him. I’ve watched him go through the numbers, plot out a merger with the Journal’s backroom operations, and fantasize about the staff’s quitting en masse as soon as he entered the sacred temple.

Given his history with the Journal, it would be a mistake to write off Murdoch's ambitions for the financially-troubled Times. And given his savvy, it would also be a mistake to assume the mogul walked through his acquisition fantasy with a media reporter for any reason other than to broadcast it to the entire world, in particular the Sulzberger family, whose dividend payouts are crippling the newspaper they supposedly would never relinquish.

[Vanity Fair]

I don't know what Byron's piece is about, but: the cool thing about covering the luxury and consumer goods industry for the Journal is that the whole nature of the relationship between reporters and the companies that they cover is predicated upon the notion that said companies want to look good to their investors. Which is generally the exact opposite of trying to look good to customers!

Essentially that means that the Journal is the one venue in which you will regularly find executives being forced to roll the "curtain" and say, "Here is our ingenious strategy for scamming people this quarter!" Or: "Isn't it amazing how when you put a giant logo over everything suddenly it's like, a Veblen Good?" Etc. etc. etc.

Perhaps there could be a great glossy magazine to be compiled from the observations and interactions and amusing existential outtakes of Journal Media & Marketing section reporters that don't fit into the paper's more traditional, Street-focused vision? Of course, giving reporters an outlet to write longer, more thoughtful stories is adamantly not the point of newspaper weekend magazines.* I mean, the Times Magazine sometimes serves that purpose, but it launched in 1896. T, which launched four years ago, is the model now! And unlike the Sunday newspaper magazines that have folded in the past twenty-odd years— here's a list — T is profitable. Too bad it is so boring to read! (Although, maybe you are not supposed to read it?)

Anyway, by the T model, WSJ editor-in-chief Tina Gaudoin and co. now has to go courting the same companies that regularly line up to embarrass themselves in the name of investor relations in the regular print Journal. Luxury goods advertisements, which make up 10% of the Times' ad revenue (and that doesn't include retailers) are still a fairly rare sight in the pages of the Journal, not because Journal readers think conspicuous consumption is tacky — far from it! — but because the newspaper, despite its new Saturday edition (even though it is where you'll find Peggy Noonan's invariably awesome column), is something most advertisers still assume most readers get and read — and leave — at work.***

But here's the thing: it is a horrible, retarded — or as a Fitch analyst recently paraphrased Confucius, "interesting" — time to launch such a magazine. Because we are basically in the jaws of a terrible recession, don't you read the Wall Street Journal? Spending is down, ad pages will be worse, the Journal does not exactly have any "first mover advantage" here, and by "industry metrics" (ad pages, extravagant launch parties, "buzz" etc.) this magazine is kind of doomed to "failure."

That could make for an opportunity though! The Journal is, from a talent and institutional knowledge perspective, capable of making a good, funny, readable version of T — just by committing to the kind of magazine its reporters might actually read. Which is not to say stories about options back-dating or the exploitation of immigrant labor or executive suite power struggles; that's why they have a daily newspaper so you can read those stories in the morning and then short the stock during the day duh!

But richly-reported stories like this or even this or the collection that created this book — stories that rely not only on the Journal's matchless access to captains of industry**** but a long-waning commitment to nuance and humor and the seemingly superfluous but telling detail (and um, length) — would get better play in a lifestyle magazine format. And Gaudoin should fight for them, even (especially!) if they stand to piss off potential advertisers, because they're precisely the sort of stories a reader wants to take home. And when Dolce and Balenciaga and LVMH decide to ramp up their marketing budgets again, that is something they will care about.

*Though having been part of a chronically-disappointed Journal staff five years ago it is good to know they're still capable of disappointment!
**Incidentally, the Journal's vaunted "Weekend Journal" section helmed by Joanne Lipman — the gig that won Lipman the job launching the highly underwhelming Conde Nast business monthly