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Claim: Wall Street Journal Page One Staff Dissolved

Ryan Tate · 06/10/08 07:28PM

A tipster is telling us that the Wall Street Journal's fabled Page One staff will be dissolved into the news desk. Page One editor Mike Williams would become a "roving features editor," which sounds much less powerful. The Page One desk is responsible, among other things, for the often breezy but always well-researched A-Hed feature, which has been increasingly marginalized as the Journal's front page gets newsier. Its disbanding would mark only the latest move by new editor Robert Thomson to remake the Journal in the image of the Financial Times, Thomson's former employer and a favorite of ultimate Journal overlord Rupert Murdoch. In fact, the paper's old guard is said by our insider to be grumbling that recent FT-like stories, like the front page article on alleged flaws in the Libor benchmark lending rate, are shoving aside "stories that appeal beyond the circle of Murdoch's friends in the global elite." But not all veteran editors are suffering under a cluster of changes said to be coming down in the coming days.

Civil War At The Wall Street Journal

Nick Denton · 04/30/08 03:24PM

Of all the cliques at the Wall Street Journal, the reporters and editors of the newspaper's Money & Investing team were most inclined to accommodate to the new régime put in place by Rupert Murdoch. They're more financially sophisticated than the average Journal reporter, and less precious; the head of the paper's third section is thought friendly with Murdoch aide Gary Ginsberg, and has even been mentioned as a candidate for managing editor; and Money & Investing is widely regarded as the newsiest part of the Journal, in need of less of a re-education than the self-indulgent feature writers of the main paper and the second section, Marketplace. And that's why this week's disastrous pep talk by the Australian media mogul's key lieutenant, Journal publisher Robert Thomson, is so damaging.