Toronto Life: Spectator

Spectator

Posts with category ‘New York Times vs Wall Street Journal’


Pot calls kettle black in ongoing feud between print and Web journalists

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The July-August issue of The Atlantic includes a piece by lead features scribbler Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) on the recent goings-on at the Wall Street Journal. In it, Bowden writes a predictable lament regarding the demise of long-form, responsible journalism in newspapers. The cause? The Web, of course, and Web-enabling buccaneer capitalists like Rupert Murdoch. All of which is fine, after a fusty Luddite fashion. But when Bowden gets up on his hind legs and announces that the Web “has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust,” I tend to get a little pissy. My debunking, after the jump.

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Might Thomson Reuters try to buy The New York Times?

As noted yesterday by my august colleague Philip Preville, the Globe and Mail has, in its infinite wisdom, eliminated one of the ways it annoys the readers of its print manifestation. They have officially ended the idiotic practice of charging for double-dipping—that is, charging for Web access to their premium material. The New York Times, a somewhat more essential read, has been free since September and the Wall Street Journal—from which the Globe still takes sloppy seconds in the business section—is moving more and more in that direction. The Globe’s archive is another matter; it remains behind a pay wall whereas the Times is mostly gratis. Still, for the Globe, it’s a start.

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Yanks trump Canucks on bloggish hockey coverage

OK, this isn’t exactly earth-shattering news, but if you care at all about hockey in the frozen north, it’s a bit of a head scratcher. Throughout the International Ice Hockey Federation championship final on Sunday, it was the New York Times that offered the only live blog during the game.

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New York’s newspaper war shifts its battleground from Manhattan to Myanmar

In keeping a weather eye on the ongoing newspaper war over New York, today’s front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are instructive. The Journal, given its earlier deadlines, led with the Myanmar cyclone and, for cover art, used a map to illustrate the extent of the damage. The Times split its headlines between last night’s primaries and the cyclone, giving more coverage to the former and devoting its art to Obama and Clinton. Initially, it bothered me that the Times would give more prime real estate to a parochial political story. Then I got into their coverage and my head turned round.

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Requiem for a newspaper: The Wall Street Journal falls into the Murdoch trap

Flipping the Rolodex of descriptors this morning, I pause at P for “plus ça change” and W for “waddya think was going to happen?” Rupert Murdoch has pulled the wool yet again. The Times and the Journal have been full of stories this week suggesting that the WSJ’s new owner is interfering with his newspaper’s editorial independence—first by foisting changes so that it might compete more directly with The New York Times (more politics, shorter stories), then by firing the ancien régime editor Marcus Brauchli, who wasn’t moving fast enough to make those changes. And this time, Rupe’s chinless, coupon-clipping victims (the Bancroft family) are so thoroughly bumfuzzled that it barely merits the usual blah blah blah about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then…oh, you know the drill.

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Newspaper war update: The New York Times cannot be bought

Not surprisingly, Arthur Sulzberger is already up on his hind legs denying that the New York Times is for sale. Mike Bloomberg also issued a denial. That should put a stop to all those nasty rumours.

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Times 2, Journal 1: Murdoch takes a page from Conrad Black’s “The Art of Newspaper War”

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Newsweek’s latest has a mammoth take out on New York’s newspaper war. Titled “Murdoch, Ink,” the dek on the article reads, “With a redesigned Wall Street Journal, mogul Rupert Murdoch is launching an old-fashioned newspaper war against The New York Times. Not since William Randolph Hearst took on Joseph Pulitzer have we seen such a fight.” And from there on in, it’s all Rupert all the time, punctuated by a series of delicious quotes straight from the horse’s mouth.

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Wall Street Journal’s parody paranoia proves that truth is stranger (and funnier) than fiction

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Here’s a reason to get up this morning. A who’s who of New York satire—including Richard Belzer, Andy Borowitz, Tony Hendra, Joe Queenan and writers from The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live and The Onion—has, of late, created My Wall Street Journal, a parody of its sober namesake. The front-page headline? “Bush Abolishes Death, Taxes; Move Will Benefit McCain.”

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NYC newspaper war now playing out in the Post, Observer and Vanity Fair

Over at the Department of Double Standards we find Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff writing one of those self-fulfilling-prophecy pieces about how dim-witted the Sulzbergers are. The item is in the May issue and muses on how the family will inevitably sell The New York Times to Warren Buffett or the Washington Post Company or Michael Bloomberg or the highest bidder. And that whoever gets it will deserve it more than the Sulzbergers because whoever it is isn’t—how to put it?—as stupid as the Sulzbergers.

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Times 2, Journal 0: The newspaper war heats up over Tom Cruise, Bear Stearns and Murdoch’s henchman

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In a feature piece last Monday, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz offered an overview of Manhattan’s current newspaper war: The New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal. Interviewed therein was the Journal’s new publisher—former Times of London editor and Murdoch henchman Robert Thomson—who took the opportunity to aim several broadsides at his uptown rival:

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How to change the Wall Street Journal without pissing off bankers

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The battle for the hearts and minds of New York newspaper readers (and every other elite reader in North America) was further joined yesterday as the Times reported on the ongoing efforts at the Journal to cut the Times’ grass: “The Wall Street Journal’s transition to more breaking news and shorter articles will continue in the coming weeks with a make-over of its Marketplace section.”

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New York’s newspaper war: Times one, Journal bupkis

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Recently, I spoke with an editor at The New York Times who grew up on Canadian journalism and plied his trade here until the late ’90s about the nostalgia that grips his former colleagues when they discuss the early days of the National Post. “They get all weepy when they talk about it. You’d think it was Paris in the ’20s or something.” Well, yes, it was—if by Paris in the ’20s you mean Don Mills in the late ’90s. Sure, there were fewer good restaurants and the architecture was a little less je ne sais quoi, but for writers, “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.”

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Spitzer coverage hints at war between The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal

If you didn’t spend at least part of day two de l’affaire Spitzer with your nose buried in the pages or, to bend the analogy, the Web sites of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I have to ask: does your blood run red? This story has it all: intrigue, hubris, venality, corruption, a wife spurned and, yes, hookers. Yet if you read carefully, another story starts to emerge: the Spitzer coverage represents the early days of an all-out newspaper war—the Journal vs. the Times—for the hearts and minds of Americans generally, and New Yorkers specifically.

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