I hesitate to say this because he has built a vast global media empire and I have not but I think Rupert Murdoch is wrong about the Wall Street Journal.

The resignation under pressure of Marcus Brauchli as its managing editor this week brought to the surface underlying tensions between Mr Murdoch and Mr Brauchli over the editorial direction of the paper.

I agree with some of the changes that Mr Murdoch wants to bring to the paper but in one big respect - his wish to compete more directly with the New York Times - he is misguided.

This piece in the New York Observer lays out neatly some of the objectives of Mr Murdoch and his trusty lieutenant Robert Thomson, the publisher of the Journal and former US managing editor of the FT.

They seem to fall into two categories.

The first, not to mince words, is to make the Journal more like the FT. This one, you may not be surprised to hear, I agree with. The Journal has a long tradition, reaching back to its managing editor Barney Kilgore, of behaving more like a magazine than a newspaper.

Since the 1940s, it has devoted its front page to a combination of news briefs and news features - known oddly as “leaders”. These pieces, often running to several thousand words, have turned from the front page to inside pages, requiring the reader to shuffle through the paper to find the rest.

Mr Murdoch does not like this and appears to favour the FT approach of keeping news stories tight and never turning them from page to page. The FT runs long news features but they are contained on the analysis page inside.

He wants, in other words, to put shorter and pithier news stories on the fronts of the news sections. This is destined to cause huge uproar at the Journal because it conflicts with tradition but, to be honest, I think he is right.

The world has changed since Kilgore and readers have less patience and spend less time with their papers. They want more easily accessible and clearly organised and illustrated news articles.

Then there is the second change, which I think is dangerous. Mr Murdoch wants to take on the New York Times directly by increasing political, cultural and general coverage in the Journal. He appears to want to put general and political news in the first section and corporate stories further back.

I can see the personal attractions of this for Mr Murdoch. He hates the liberalism of the Times and regards it as a lazy, insular paper that is vulnerable to a tougher competitor. He thinks he can steal both advertising and circulation from what is the closest thing the US has to an upmarket national paper.

He could be correct but he faces two problems.

The first is that the Journal is already a national paper with a big circulation and it is far from obvious that it will be able to undermine the New York Times, given the latter’s longer experience in general news.

The second is that he will dilute the brand - something that a business newspaper should know all about. At the moment, the Journal has a dominant position and a clear and unambiguous image as a business and financial paper.

That not only brings it a lot of readers but an enviable appeal to advertisers. If Mr Murdoch confuses them by making it more like a watered down (and right-wing) version of the New York Times, he stands to lose a lot.

As it happens, the FT went through a similar experience in the UK a few years ago, adding more general news in an effort to compete head-on with other broadsheet papers.

I think the best that can politely be said of that experiment is that it did not work. The paper’s reputation suffered and its readers got confused. Happily, it has now recovered both its focus and its reputation.

Of course, Mr Murdoch dominates News Corp and can safely ignore the critics if he gets the satisfaction of attacking the New York Times. Even if that makes limited commercial sense, it could bring him more political influence in the US, which is something he has always enjoyed and exploited.

But if the share price continues to do badly and the Journal experiment runs into similar problems, I would not be surprised to find him doing a U-turn in a year or two.

It goes without saying that the FT is a direct competitor of the Journal, and Robert Thomson is a former colleague, so I have a vested interest. I also argued in an earlier column that Mr Murdoch would be a better proprietor for the Journal than the Bancroft family.

April 25, 2008 10:18am in Media | Comment