"Oh, don't change the standard, then," Thomson replied. "Just be consistent." The following day, Brauchli was amused to see the New York Post's story on the topic led with a "record" increase in operating income.
On February 13, a snowy day not long after the bureau chiefs' meeting, Thomson stood in Brauchli's ninth-floor office with a request from the boss. "Rupert thinks I should have an office on nine," he said, almost sheepishly. Until then, Thomson had resided on the executive eleventh floor and had to descend two floors on the elevator to see the news desk on the ninth floor.
Brauchli swiveled in his chair to face out his wall of windows overlooking the newsroom, where beyond his assistant's desk there lay a swath of empty carpet and no desks or reporters or editors. Brauchli's grand redesign of the newsroom hadn't yet begun, and there was still a large chunk of the newsroom that wasn't being used.
"Gee, there's no space down here," he said to Thomson, with a barely perceptible smile.
"Look, it's not what you think," Thomson said. "He doesn't want to make me editor." With his stooped carriage and ever present black suits, Thomson cut an unusual figure in the newsroom, but he could be unexpectedly charming. Thomson was ultimately responsible, in Murdoch's eyes, for the paper, though Brauchli didn't see it that way. Thomson didn't want to have to continue to answer to Murdoch that he had no desk on the newsroom floor.
"To be honest, he wants us to be seen more in the newsroom. He thinks we should be visible," Thomson said.
"Does he want me to quit?" asked Brauchli.
"No, no," said Thomson, attempting to smooth things over and yet deliver a message. "He just wants things to move faster. You and he are moving in the same direction; it's just a matter of speed."
"I have to look after the culture and the staff, too. I can't do it all at once," Brauchli said, pausing. "You have to protect me."
"I take a lot of bullets for you, to be honest," Thomson shot back. Brauchli's face flushed.
He recovered quickly, accustomed as he was at this stage to the battering of his position. He suggested Thomson take over a vacant conference room near where the reporters for the financial magazine Barron's sat. The room was the second-to-last office on the way out of the Journal's ninth-floor newsroom, between the Journal's graphics department and the Barron's office space.
"If you take that," Brauchli said, always strategizing, "I can make the case you are in between the two publications and not in the Journal newsroom." Thomson agreed to the arrangement but warned Brauchli, "Never tell Rupert I'm not in the Journal newsroom."
Of course, Murdoch needn't be told something he could witness with his own eyes, and the symbolism of it enraged him. Murdoch wanted his man on the newsroom floor, someone he could call to hear the latest news of the day. He didn't pay more than $5 billion to see his closest intimate stashed away in a closet nowhere near the reporters. That move, simple and petty, helped usher in what came next.
Murdoch still hadn't adjusted to the formality of the Dow Jones staff he had inherited, nor they to his unexpected outbursts. In a March 2008 meeting, Murdoch dropped by to listen to the paper's plans to promote yet another redesign, due to launch April 21 with some of Brauchli's proposed changes. When told he should listen to the paper's public relations plan, Murdoch said it wasn't necessary. "We don't need to talk about this," he said. Public relations was something Murdoch had never fully trusted. He thought it was a waste of time and, worse, a way to tip your hand to a competitor.
"You really should hear what Bob has to say," urged Kelly Leach, who worked on strategy for Dow Jones, referring to the ever affable vice president of communications, Robert Christie. Earlier in the week, the New York Times had run a lukewarm story on the paper's overhaul of its "Marketplace" section. "Usually my philosophy is we get ahead of the story," Christie ventured, "so we're not in a reactionary mode."
"Fuck the New York Times," Murdoch growled, suddenly surly. "I don't care what the media says."
"But Rupert," ventured Leach, "we know our advertisers aren't committed on incremental advertising spend—"
"We're going to do this our way and not give them a road map," Murdoch replied, beginning what became a longer-than-expected rant. "We're going to build a fantastic newspaper. I don't give a fuck what the media says," he continued.
Finally, Leach edged back into the conversation. "We've been doing market research of our readers and their opinion of the Journal has diminished since News Corp. announced it was going to acquire Dow Jones."
Then Rupert Murdoch, who had been simmering under the surface, exploded. "We're going to build a fucking great paper and I do not give a fuck what New York or the media has to say about it! We'll build the world's best paper!" This must be what truly energized him. He didn't want these nervous midlevel people around him, questioning every move. He wanted them to be aggressive and have fun and be a little more like one of the team.
20. Resigned
ON AN UNSEASONABLY COOL April morning, Murdoch, looking buoyant, boarded his 130-foot Boeing jet, spacious enough in a standard model to accommodate 125 people but shuttling only 5 that day. Given Murdoch's plans, his mood might have convinced those who called him cold-blooded of the accuracy of their description. Maybe it was the prospect of change, not the task ahead, that was energizing him.
Murdoch passed distractedly down the long corridor lined with blond wood and past the bedroom, tastefully decorated with a beige bedspread and ivory pillows and blankets. He shuffled past the private meeting room with a long conference table surrounded by seven seafoam-green leather easy chairs. The flight attendant, Peggy, busied herself arranging the pillows and otherwise tidied up. Idle hands, her activity suggested, need not apply.
Murdoch threw himself down on a plush seat at the back of the plane, which was among the largest on the private tarmac. "Oh, the Arabs' planes are bigger," he casually offered to Gary Ginsberg, his spokesman, who was waiting for him. Added fuel tanks on this model allowed him to travel ten hours without stopping—nice for trips back to his native Australia, where he traveled at least once a year and which, after all these years away, still remained the continent on which he felt most at ease.
Today, the trip was less ambitious. They were headed to Washington, DC, to a dinner honoring Murdoch at the Atlantic Council—a nonpartisan think tank that aspired to promote civilian dialogue among NATO member countries. Spain's former prime minister José Maria Aznar, a fellow conservative and News Corp. board member, had suggested Murdoch for the award, and while skeptical of the organization, Murdoch wanted to help his friend. Such awards were obligations for him and the dinners that accompanied them almost lethal. The Distinguished Business Award event would normally have been no night to remember, but he would be there, smiling occasionally and feigning interest in the proceedings. At least he would be sitting next to Henry Kissinger, which might prove entertaining.
The night before the plane trip to DC, Murdoch took his two youngest daughters, ages six and four, out to dinner. "A big adventure," he said. "Dinner with Daddy." The domestic evening of dinner with the girls behind him, Murdoch was on the plane to DC, about to make his move. He would show that the Journal was under his control. Four months after Murdoch's deal for the Journal had closed, Marcus Brauchli, the managing editor of the paper, was about to leave the picture.
"It'll all be finalized in two hours," Murdoch said to Ginsberg.
Many times the News Corp. "pirates" had signaled the arrival of the new order with the tossing of figureheads. Often Murdoch explicitly fired them, but many times they got the message and jumped before they were pushed. The only consistency was that they left. Dorothy Schiff was supplanted at the New York Post, New York's Clay Felker was ejected, Harry Evans of the Times of London was suddenly redundant. Murdoch made no concessions to sentiment or even familial association. As everyone knew, Murdoch had allowed News Corp. executives like Roger Ailes, the former Nixon speechwriter, to undermine his tattooed and athletic elder son, Lachlan, who
m Murdoch had trained from his earliest days to take over at the company. Ailes prevailed—he'd won the old man's affection by building Fox News. At Dow Jones, it had been similar. Zannino offered to leave his post but simultaneously said, "'I'll hang around and help or be available if you like,'" Murdoch remembered. "But I've taken up offers like that in the past. And then I moved in, and always by the afternoon of the first day, I'm telling the guy to put his hat on and get out."
For almost a year, Brauchli had a lame-duck tenure, delicately attempting to protect himself from his new boss's encroachments. Not for a day had Brauchli appeared truly in charge. His limited reach wasn't a shock; he'd seen all of this coming and was holding out as best he could. Shortly after Murdoch's bid for the Journal became public, Brauchli sighed, saying to a friend, "I work my whole career to get this job and now I'm working for Murdoch?"
On the plane, Murdoch was dressed in a chalk-stripe gray flannel suit with a white spread-collar shirt and a red patterned tie. He scanned the morning's Journal and looked with disappointment at his new toy.
"It's starting to look like a real newspaper," attempted Ginsberg, hoping to draw out his boss on the paper. The reaction was muted.
Murdoch's brow furrowed. His white handkerchief peeked out of his front breast pocket, like the white roots that betrayed his pale brown dyed hair. "The stories could be better, but it's a start."
This morning, April 21, 2008, was the first day of the official redesign that was inching the paper in the direction where Murdoch wanted it to move. Previously the old Journal, with its airless but important appearance, had seemed beyond time's changes, newsstand appeal, and even questions of readability. It seemed designed for those so seriously and closely intertwined in the events described that not even a nuance could be sacrificed. The paper's front page had contained three lengthy feature stories every day down its sides and middle, like columns adorning the front of an ancient temple. In lieu of sensational photos, the page showcased stately ink-drawn portraits of the business figures it featured. Even before Murdoch, the temple had been under siege: breaking news, color, and photos, the province of the populist papers, had nosed their way into those sacrosanct spaces.
The changes Brauchli and others had rushed to make were evident in that morning's paper, which displayed a new sports page, more political coverage, shorter stories, and bigger headlines. The unusual vertical design that had graced the front page of the Journal for most of its history had all but disappeared. The day before Pennsylvanians were to vote in a primary for either Hillary or Obama, political stories—accompanied by large color photos—dominated the front page. A four-column headline stretched over them, announcing in tall, bold letters: "Latest Attacks Roil Democrats."
The notion that the Journal could be a second read, famously espoused by the legendary midcentury Journal editor Barney Kilgore, was no more. No one had time to read two publications. And anyway, Murdoch didn't want to be second at anything. As smaller papers around the country faltered, Murdoch wanted to pick off their readers. Turning to the second section of the Journal, "Marketplace," he mused, "I think we'll change it from 'Marketplace' to 'Business.'"
He paused briefly, then said, "I don't know." Then he abruptly shot down his own suggestion. It seemed that Murdoch wasn't exactly certain what he wanted to do with the paper he had coveted for twenty years. At first, his judgments had looked haphazard; he demanded the paper make its Web site free and then would reverse himself once presented with Dow Jones's research on the money such a decision could cost the company. He was an improviser.
Though the paper wasn't what he wanted it to be yet, he was casual, confident, and unconcerned. The Journal would evolve, each move making possible the next, and in time a new personality—breathless, naive, and attention-getting—would greet readers who once considered the paper the province of carefully considered judgments and old blue suits. "More graphics, with more color; just you wait," he murmured.
He opened the Financial Times, London's Journal equivalent, which Murdoch had attempted—and uncharacteristically failed—to buy years before. He glanced through, looking for lessons. As he scanned the pages, he noted the preeminence of reports from behind the scenes. He loved colorful quotes. Murdoch was a fan of full access and on-the-ground reporting. He didn't want his reporters analyzing; he wanted them pounding the pavement, telling him what the important people had to say about important things.
"See, they have very strong reporting on Obama and Clinton. In the FT, you hear word for word what they're saying, they have somebody with them, you can tell." He took a quick look at the Journal. "Our story," he said, pausing. "Typical overediting." But then he pulled back, not wanting to be too harsh. "You could argue it either way."
As he was no longer the renegade never invited to dinner, Murdoch now found himself a tourist attraction for the obsequious politicos and dignitaries on global jaunts. They knew, as he did, that enemies and opponents were best kept on a first-name basis. He enjoyed their entreaties. He wasn't afraid of making his own. Right now, Murdoch wanted a sit-down with Obama, and Ginsberg wanted to firm up a meeting between his boss and the young candidate who was closing in on the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton was expected to win in Pennsylvania, but Obama was the star and had the momentum.
Murdoch made a point of establishing friendly relationships with politicians in his adopted homes. When Hillary Clinton stepped up to become senator from New York, Murdoch made a bridge to her as a fellow pragmatist. She was planning to run for president and didn't hold grudges. The Journal's editorial page never made such allowances. It had hounded the Clintons for everything but their fashion decisions and devotion to fast food. In a particularly vicious attack in June 1993, the editorial page singled out Vincent Foster, deputy White House counsel and a former law partner of the then First Lady, with the headline "Who Is Vincent Foster?" Other editorials about Foster and his role in the Clinton White House followed. On July 20, 1993, Foster was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. With him was a suicide note of sorts, reading, "The WSJ editors lie without consequence." But Hillary let it all go and came to the table. Her reward was what seemed to be, at the top of the primary season, Murdoch's support.
Hillary wasn't the stock to buy at this juncture. Murdoch, intrigued by Obama and his surprise win in the Iowa caucus, had started to distance himself from Senator Clinton. Months earlier, in January, Murdoch's New York Post endorsed Obama over the former first lady, disappointing those in the Clinton camp who had pieced together the rapprochement with Murdoch. Ginsberg, who had worked for the Clintons years earlier, had reached out to Obama numerous times, but to no avail. Obama-ites, including Al Gore and others, said the candidate was interested in talking to Murdoch. Yet no meeting was forthcoming. The latest intermediary, former U.S. senator Tom Daschle, had broached the subject to Ginsberg, who decided on the plane to gauge his boss's interest in pursuing a meeting.
"We don't want to be supplicants," Ginsberg said quietly to Murdoch.
"On the other hand," replied Murdoch, looking toward the window that morning on the plane, privately exploring an altogether different angle, "we don't want him to win the presidency thinking we are bitterly hostile."
Just before 10:00 a.m. as the plane lifted off, Murdoch's thoughts turned to his comments for the lunch with Atlantic Council members that day. He went over his address for the gathering. Like the dinner speech, these words were written by recently retired Bush speechwriter William McGurn. Murdoch had just hired him as his speechwriter; in a pleasant felicitous synergy, McGurn's column debuted on the op-ed page of the Journal that morning.
His carefully organized pages in hand, Murdoch asked Peggy, the flight attendant, for some coconut water, one of his favorite health boosters. Murdoch was always looking for a way to maintain his energy, to stay youthful, to not slow down. It was one of the habits that betrayed his awareness of growing older, a bit of reality he successfully ignored. Wendi had banned dessert as part of an eff
ort to keep Murdoch slim. Peggy placed a lowball glass in the gold-rimmed built-in coaster in front of her employer, who stood up and raised it. "It's a magic potion. No calories, and packed with all sorts of..." He trailed off, snapping his fingers together, trying to remember the name. "Electrolytes," he finally resolved, heading down the hallway to his private meeting room as the plane passed over New Jersey.
Two weeks before, on April 7 to be exact, Marcus Brauchli sat in the dingy ninth-floor conference room of Dow Jones's headquarters in Battery Park City. He had arranged for the chiefs of domestic and foreign bureaus to call in that morning to hear a discussion of the paper's proposed direction. Around the table, deputy managing editor for news coverage Bill Grueskin, Page One editor Mike Williams, and deputy managing editor Alix Freedman all sat with him. The New York chiefs also gathered to hear a new way to think about the paper. Brauchli hand-picked Grueskin and Williams for their jobs. Each, like Brauchli, possessed a desire to change the paper and the confidence to think they were the right men to do it. Freedman was the longest-serving deputy M.E. of the three and the only one to survive Brauchli's management shuffle intact. She was now the anointed keeper of the Journal's ethical standards.
Murdoch's outspoken statements that there were too many editors at the paper—he had repeated his amazement that stories in the Journal were touched "an average of 8.3 times" before appearing in print—fueled anxieties that were already running high. Fear of firings (what was a Murdoch takeover without a bloodletting?) accelerated as the new era announced itself in not-so-subtle ways. Traditional "leders," the long, narrative, front-page stories that were a Journal trademark, were disappearing in favor of shorter news stories. Brevity was always desirable these days. So was anything political. Coverage of the presidential primaries dominated the front page in a paper that had originally made its name with enlightening features on business and the economy. This revolution had originally been instigated by Brauchli, but it was Murdoch's message that had been heard loud and clear around the Journal empire.
War at the Wall Street Journal Page 24
