A Heavy Blow to The Wall Street Journal
From Columbia Journalism Review’s report on the departure of the Wall Street Journal’s Page One editor Alix M. Freedman:
When wunderkind Bernard Kilgore took over as managing editor of the Journal at the ripe old age of 32, the paper did some nice business reporting, but it was narrow and formulaic, a dreary pastiche of incremental business stories—mostly government or corporate reports—arranged haphazardly on page one and throughout the paper and aimed solely at investors. The paper’s circulation, in the mid-30,000s, hadn’t recovered since the Crash of ’29 (it was never that big; 50,000 was the peak) and its owner, Dow Jones, was on fumes financially.
Kilgore’s genius was to throw out the stale editorial model—the inverted pyramid, all that crap—and create a system that would be able to produce two long-form stories a day and take readers into corners of the economy they would otherwise never have seen: a salad-oil swindle in New Jersey, Lyndon Johnson’s wife’s broadcasting empire, slave-labor camps in Houston. Eventually, of course, Journal reporters slipped the bounds of business reporting itself—or expanded them, one could argue—and ventured further and further into American society: the secret shame of illiterates, Cabrini Green, chicken plants, you name it.
To do these kinds of stories, two a day, day after day, Kilgore and his lieutenants created an organization-within-an-organization, Page One, that was autonomous, anomalous, and imperious, but, all in all, produced a pretty talented bunch of journalists over the years.
