Paul Steiger: 'What Is the Role of the Print Newspaper?'
The managing editor of the Wall Street Journal insists that the print edition of the financial newspaper shows "significant vigor" even though audiences "increasingly live on the Web." He adds: "We'll do more" blogs.

By Patrick Phillips
I Want Media, 01/02/07


The Wall Street Journal is kicking off the new year with a dramatic redesign that reduces the width of the iconic, 118-year-old financial newspaper by a full column. The newly spiffed up flagship publication of Dow Jones & Co. is increasing its focus on "what the news means" not just "what happened," while shifting breaking news stories online.

Longtime managing editor Paul Steiger, who is set to step down from his position at the end of the year, is overseeing the editorial side of the transition.

I Want Media: Jan. 2 is a big day for the Wall Street Journal. Are you nervous?

Paul Steiger: I think we're well prepared. We've done a number of similar moves in the last several years. In 1998 we launched the Weekend Journal on Fridays, which added a new section to the paper, something we hadn't done in a decade. In 2002 we added Personal Journal three days a week and put color on all four section fronts. Then in September 2005 we returned to publishing on Saturdays after 50 years with Weekend Edition. This new format we're unveiling is another major change. But it's not as if we're not used to major changes.

IWM: The Journal is shifting to breaking news stories on the Web while emphasizing analysis in the print newspaper. Why is it necessary to make this move?

Steiger: I'm not sure that it's necessary, but it does seem like the right thing to do. We're increasingly taking our scoops to online. Why? Because the online audience keeps growing. We now have about 800,000 paid [online subscribers]. Our audience increasingly lives on the Web. In the office they've got the desktop or laptop. And the BlackBerry and the phone are more and more often devices for receiving news. We want to respond to that. Naturally, this leads to the question: What is the role of the print newspaper in this world?

Even though more and more of our readers are online, they're not online all day. If they're in wall-to-wall meetings, or at their kids' soccer game, they need the print Journal. But instead of running a 700-word story on an announcement news event, we're going to put the story into a context other news outlets don't have, or pitch it forward in some way, or we'll squeeze it -- we'll give it to you so you know that it happened, but we'll shrink the size.

IWM: The smaller page width is said to result in 10 percent less room for stories. Does that concern you?

Steiger: It won't. Let me walk through the arithmetic. The shrinkage of the width is 20 percent, not 10 percent. When we set out to do this, the publisher agreed that we would add enough pages to cut that reduction in news hole to half, from 20 percent to 10 percent. And then we decided that we would get half of that 10 percent, or 5 percent, by a further culling of list stats -- the quotations of stock prices from the New York and NASDAQ exchanges and the quotation of mutual-fund prices. And so that leaves 5 percent.

We've actually done some of this shrinking of stats in the paper already. We've also done some of the tightening of the more announcement-driven news stories. The bottom line is that aside from a further culling of the stats, there's no significant reduction in the news hole at all.

IWM: What do you expect will be the reception by readers?

Steiger: We've done a lot of testing, including focus groups, and the response has been very positive. The more compact size is easier to handle. The Journal has been wider than any other U.S. newspaper, and we're taking it down to a standard size. But what people want is to be sure that they're not getting cheated on the coverage. And once they see that the coverage is as robust as ever, and that some new things have been added, they like it.

IWM: The new design includes summary boxes and "infographics" to "enhance visual communication." That sounds a lot like USA Today. Was USA Today an influence?

Steiger: USA Today many, many years ago influenced newspaper design across the board. They used color not only before us, but before the New York Times did. We each adapted color to our own purposes. The Journal will be clearly recognizable as the Journal. Nobody's going to mistake it for USA Today.

IWM: Both the European and Asian editions of the Journal are published in a tabloid format. Did you consider changing the U.S. edition to a tabloid?

Steiger: It was raised early on. But the overseas papers are very different. The overseas papers in broadsheet would be roughly 18, 20, 22 pages. So you double the page count to make them tabloid and get 36, 40, 44 pages. That's a very nice size for a tabloid. The Journal on a typical day is 50, 60, 80 pages, or even more, and it's a four section paper. If you double that, you're talking about 100, 120, even 160 pages, all in a single section. That's very awkward and you lose the value of sectioning. We concluded very early on that we wanted to stay with a broadsheet.

We thought about a Berliner also, because a Berliner folds like a broadsheet and you can have sectioning that way. But one of the big reasons that we've gone to the narrow web width is to be able to contract print on presses other than our own. That gives us enormous flexibility. But Berliner is not a common size in the U.S., so that kind of change would defeat the purpose. We very quickly dismissed the notion of either a tabloid or a Berliner and focused on going to a standard broadsheet width.

IWM: Why are both the print and online Journal going for free on Jan. 2?

Steiger: Because we think we've got something great in both modes, and we want people to try them, if they haven't for a while. Once or twice a year we have "open houses" for the online edition, because nothing sells it better than itself. We feel the same way about the print paper. So this is a way for us to say: You don't have to pull a buck out of your pocket. If you're stopping by a newsstand, check us out.

IWM: The Journal recently closed its Canadian bureaus, letting go six reporters. Do you anticipate making similar moves in the near future?

Steiger: No. That was four full-timers and two part-timers in Canada. They were all good people. But the way that our coverage has evolved is that increasingly we get the best coverage of companies in Canada by reporters who cover the industry in the U.S. The same group of reporters that covers Verizon and AT&T covers Nortel. These companies are in the same business, they have the same set of issues, they're in the same time zones. So why not cover them that way? That leaves the political, social and economic coverage of Canada, which is something for one reporter, or maybe even less than a full-time reporter, to do.

This contrasts with Mexico, where I've got four reporters, because the language is different, they're covering immigration issues and a rapidly developing political system. There are all kinds of things that make it appropriate to have a big team of reporters in Mexico, but not a big team of reporters in Canada. Also, in Canada we already have 20 [Dow Jones] news wire reporters. So if some big, hot news event occurs up there, we have people that we can draw on already in place.

IWM: So you don't anticipate any more job cuts?

Steiger: I don't anticipate any layoffs. Look, we could have an economic crisis. The supply of oil gets cut off from Saudi Arabia and the economy goes into a deep funk, and all bets are off. But I can meet my budget for the coming year without doing any other layoffs. So I'm not envisioning that.

IWM: The Journal decided 10 years ago to charge for access to its online edition while most other newspaper Web sites are free. Did other newspapers make a mistake by not charging?

Steiger: I can't speak for other papers. But I think that what we did was right for us. Those subscription charges give us a big cushion against the vicissitudes of the advertising market. At the same time, there are the issues of being part of the conversation. And when the ad sales market is growing rapidly, some free sites can get a real surge in ad revenues. We think by going this approach we can have it both ways, because we are increasingly finding ways of showing a little leg outside the wall, where we're useful for people who are not prepared to make a full-time commitment to the Journal Online.

At the same time, for folks who are -- and there's more and more of them every year -- we're continuing to enhance the site to make it more useful and attractive. If you look at what other news sites are doing, they're trying to find ways to charge for part of their content. It's much easier to do that when you start off charging for content and then open up some stuff to the free side, as compared to starting free and then trying to charge people for it, 'cause they get angry.

IWM: Is it too late for other papers to start charging for their online editions?

Steiger: I don't know that. While it seems like the Web has been around forever, in fact it's still a young, rapidly developing environment. I'd be the last one to say that. I just think that I'd rather be in our position than theirs.

IWM: More and more readers are turning from print newspapers to the Web for news. Is it conceivable that print newspapers will one day disappear?

Steiger: Anything is conceivable. But I think there will always be a role for print, even if it's delivered electronically. I'm very optimistic about the role of print. We have found increasingly that the print paper for a lot of people is a complement to online. It's not an either/or situation. And there are still people who want either just print or just online. The way we're thinking of it is to serve those audiences and to think of our core audience as being one that uses both.

This past year when we marketed print and online together at an attractive price it flew off the shelves. According to the most recent ABC statement, our individually paid print subscribers went up by 10 percent. That doesn't suggest that the print side is moribund. On the contrary, it's got significant vigor. What we're trying to do is maximize the advantages of both print and online and try to serve very well the people who want one or the other.

IWM: One of the Journal's new daily features, Informed Reader, aims to "identify relevant insights from other news sources, beyond the Journal." That sort of aggregation function sounds rather blog-like. Will it be, in essence, a blog in print?

Steiger: Don't worry, we're not competing with you in print. We'll try to compete online. [laughter]

No, it is drawn from the Web. But it's a little bit different in that you can't click on something while you're reading it. So it has to be a little less open-ended. It has to be more like a complete mini-meal instead of something that will get you into something else. We're going to try to find stuff from a variety of sources.

It won't be breaking news: If the Washington Post has a news story that changes the game, we'll follow it in our news columns and give them credit and try to advance the story ourselves. But this is the kind of thing that can show up in a newspaper, in a magazine, in a television interview or in a blog that we find particularly interesting. And we'll have some writers or editors try to convey the essence of it in a very few words. I think that'll be fun. It's an opening out of the paper to insights from folks other than our staff, although carefully edited by our staff.

IWM: What's your opinion of the blogging phenomenon? Do you read blogs?

Steiger: Sure. I defy you to find anybody in the news business who doesn't look at Romenesko, for example. Blogs are a great innovation. They communicate quickly and provide ways for readers to hop-scotch across a wide variety of other pieces of information. I think that they're a revolutionary phenomenon. We've done some of that on our own. Our OpinionJournal.com was an early blog-like device. We're doing a bunch of them ourselves, and we'll do more.

IWM: How do you start your news day every morning? Do you first read news online or in print?

Steiger: I'm online at night. I have the biorhythm of a morning newspaper person. That is, I tend to stay up late and have a hard time getting up in the morning. And so when I get up in the morning I'm grabbing print -- the Journal, the New York Times, sometimes one or both of the New York tabloids, sometimes the New York Sun. On weekends, the Washington Post.

I don't get online until I'm in the cab going to the office, and then most of the time I use my Blackberry to check email and sometimes check on a couple of news sites. And then when I hit the office I've got WSJ.com and MarketWatch rolling along. Plus, I've got CNBC on with the sound off. I'm assaulted with news all day long.

IWM: You are said to be stepping down at the end of 2007. Are you retiring?

Steiger: My wife says that the first day she finds me in sweatpants at 10:30 in the morning it is not divorce, it is murder. I will not be retiring.

IWM: When do you expect your successor will be named?

Steiger: My understanding is sometime this spring, between March and May. But that's tentative. It's not up to me, it's up to my bosses.

IWM: Do you know who some of the candidates will be?

Steiger: I do, but I'm not going to discuss them.

IWM: You must have seen a lot of changes in newspapering in your 40-year career. Have all the changes been good?

Steiger: In the space of business news, changes have been overwhelmingly good. There used to be very few people doing business news. It was the least competitive zone. At the typical metro paper they sort of took the old drunks and put them out to pasture in the business section. Most papers were usually interested in just a little copy to put around the stock tables.

That's been totally transformed, starting in the late '60s and '70s when papers around the country started expanding the amount of space devoted to business. When the Journal recruits now, we find people who have experience covering business and don't feel insulted if you suggest that they might want to work for a newspaper that's oriented toward business. So the talent pool is just amazing. The talent and skills of people that I see in my corner of this field are enormously better than they were 40 years ago. That's very rewarding to see.

IWM: What changes have you seen that are not so positive?

Steiger: The thing that I try to lean against is pack journalism: when somebody writes something, lots of other people feel obliged to follow. I think the best stories are often when you go in the opposite direction of the pack.

One thing that worries me right now is that we're seeing more and more movies by government, including in the U.S., to get sources revealed. Prosecutors and judges seem increasingly inclined to put the squeeze on journalists to reveal their sources. That's a very dangerous development. It's very important for the public that journalists get access to information and are able to publish it.

IWM: What advice would you have for a young journalist starting his or her career today?

Steiger: Never be afraid of asking what seems like a dumb question. The dumb questions are often the best questions. And to write, write, write as much as you can.



PREVIOUS MEDIA INTERVIEWS