Murdoch's Monster: The Journal of the Plague Years

"This content hub will be the most powerful generator of news and information anywhere in the world,” said Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

He was speaking from his offices in the World Financial Center on Liberty Street, for the past 24 years the home of The Journal. But he was talking about 1211 Avenue of Americas, the corporate headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

On Friday, The Journal will move the bulk of its reporting operation to floors four through eight at the building reporters at the newspaper, bought last year by Mr. Murdoch, refer to as the Death Star.

“It was impossible to make [The Journal] work in this space,” Mr. Thomson said.

But now that Mr. Murdoch will have all of Dow Jones within easy reach of his News Corp. nest, he will make The Journal work. Hard.

For the past 19 months, since Mr. Murdoch got his hands on The Journal, he has been slowly, deliberately turning it into his newspaper. The Journal, until so recently the quiet, stentorian creation of Barney Kilgore, reported in a newsroom with the hush of the library about it by gentleman commuters generally more interested in making it home for dinner than making it to Michael’s for lunch, worried over by editors with a literary bee buzzing around in their fedoras, has been his for a year. None of the doomsday scenarios have played out. Yes, he got his new editor. He got his sports section, he got some color onto Page One, some Washington Post-y broadsheet layouts, a lifestyle magazine. But it’s not a tabloid. Nobody is screaming from the front page. Instead The Journal has become, the erudite, broadsheet expression of News Corp. America, the side of Mr. Murdoch’s operation (think of The Australian, The Times of London), that New York has never really seen.

On Friday, the bulk of The Journal’s newsroom—reporters and editors from economics, the editorial page, health, law, money and investing, media, personal finance, investigative, real estate, Sunday Journal—will be moving in. By the end of the month, Mr. Thomson will join them. 

The Journal’s new space will be in the old Celanese building, where it’ll share quarters with Fox News, the Fox Business Channel, the New York Post.

“We want it to be the most modern and dynamic media space in the world,” wrote Dow Jones CEO Leslie Hinton in a memo to staff announcing the move last year.

“It’s amoeba-like in some ways,” said Mr. Thomson. He was trying to describe the table at the center of the sixth-floor newsroom, where he’ll be sitting along with all of his top lieutenants.

“Well, it’s more organic than that,” he continued. “It’s obviously designed in a way that at the very heart of it you can have a conversation between the news wires, the paper, online and Market Watch. It’s difficult to describe because it’s so unprecedented.”

The floors are airy, with lots of sunlight. Editors will have offices with sliding glass doors and colorful chairs opposite their desks—bright, electric red for some, neon green for others. Reporters will be sitting in a wide-open, bullpen-style area with some reporters sitting two to the same long desk.

“I think it will be easier for Rupert Murdoch to see what the folks are doing and lend his advice because he’ll just have to go up and down a couple floors, not go across town,” said Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Journal under its previous owners.

Well, obviously! But it’s also a question of how much Mr. Murdoch can see.

“In the new office, we don’t have a lot of personal space,” said one reporter who has been there for less than two years. “It looks more like a trading floor than our current office.” 

The old office, with its sprawl of square feet and the premium on privacy for reporters gave off the air of a library more than a newsroom. Mr. Murdoch was not a fan.

“He wants a hardscrabble, messy newsroom,” said one reporter. “He always hated the Journal newsroom because it was so quiet, even though people kind of liked it that way. He likes the notion that newsrooms are noisy and chaotic and that there are no divisions between desks—the idea that you’re all standing around and screaming and throwing copy around.”

There is also the logistics—moving around is going to be much easier.

“Rupert wants more access-driven journalists at The Journal,” said a reporter. “There is this false conceit about The Journal’s journalism that they didn’t shmooze enough, they don’t go to enough parties, they don’t do what they needed to be doing. They want their journalists to be out on the town and for everyone to be sourcing and reporting.”

Mr. Thomson didn’t like the idea of his reporters “shmoozing”—“the cocktail consciousness that some parts of the media have in their relationship to New York, that’s not The Journal,” he said—but he did acknowledge that putting his newspaper in midtown, and among the well-connected and very public reporters of much of the rest of the News Corp. operation, gave certain advantages from a strictly journalistic point of view.

“For reporters, it is a far better place for reaching out to contacts and doing what journalists are supposed to—breakfast, lunch and dine with people who are good sources,” said Mr. Thomson. “Whether it’s financial with JPMorgan, Barclays, whomever, the surviving ones, are in the district. You’ve got 57th street private-equity and hedge fund row. There are media companies, pharmaceuticals—you’re much better placed.”

Jeffrey Trachtenberg, a veteran of the publishing beat, said he’s within blocks of four major publishers.

“It puts the walk back in your beat,” he said.

And better placed to share content with other Dow Jones properties: “The most important thing we can possibly do in the reorganization is to bring together the news wires and the paper and all the other editorial arms of Dow Jones, and it’s a vast resource which you want to leverage,” Mr. Thomson said.

Mr. Thomson couldn’t put a price on how much the move will cost, but Journal sources estimate it’s well in the millions, and could touch eight figures. One real estate broker familiar with the transaction said that the costs in midtown will run Mr. Murdoch a third more than what he paid for his space downtown. One reason, the broker said, is that with Dow Jones occupying five floors at the new tower, space had to be rented out at 1185 Avenue of the Americas, which is a deal that was struck before real estate rents started dropping. In the first quarter of 2009, the average asking rent for the best office towers on Sixth Avenue in the Rockefeller Center area was $82.03, while the asking rent for top space in the Financial District was $60.67, according to statistics provided by Cushman & Wakefield, a real estate firm.

As Journal reporters stumble out of their brand-new offices, they will be welcomed to a brand-new culture shock.

“It’s getting gossiped about with the way The Times does,” said one reporter. “Just the fact that anybody cares! The only time when anyone wrote about the Journal was 1997, when there was rebellion in the Bancroft family. And then the next 10 years, it was nothing.”

The new real estate space means The Journal will be pushed into the forefront in a whole new way.

In the elevators, in the gym—which Journal reporters can join for $7 per week—they’ll be reminded wherever they turn that they are now aliens living in someone else’s house.

“In the cafeteria, there has been some reaction to the names of the sandwiches!” said an editor. “There is some sort of O’Reilly wrap.”

“When you walk in, you walk by this huge picture of Fox Nation,” said a reporter. “That’s the hardest part for them to handle—that you’re in the same building as Fox News. There’s this sort of visceral feeling that you’re cheek to cheek to the least palatable parts of Murdoch world. He owns The Times of London, The Australian and then you’re there with Fox News.”

And even when you wind up climbing back to your desk, the TVs all have a feed tuned directly into Fox News and the Fox Business Channel. Reporters who are there now said that they can’t change the channel, but a Journal spokesman said, “The TV channels can be changed. Facilities will be coordinating the distribution of the remote controls once the move is complete.”

“We’re going through such a big cultural shift already that this is less stark than it was a year ago,” said one staffer. “I think when it starts to mount, people will say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is rather radical!’ But we’ve gone through so much change now that this is just another step.”

“Life is life,” said editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz. “You’re talking to the same people. Washington is there, the president there, the press—as it is—is there. The interior life that you’ve lived as writers and journalists is precisely the same. Am I going to walk by Rock Plaza and say here are the great giants? Give me a break.”

And so with it, the final piece of its transformation from a quirky companion read to a 21st-century media news outfit seen through the eyes of Rupert Murdoch.

“I think people see this as the final step of indoctrination,” said a Journal editor. 

Since 1882, when Charles Henry Dow, Edward Davis Jones and Charles Milford Bergstresser first began sending messengers out to local businesses with copies of the handwritten daily bulletin, The Journal has been operating a newspaper in downtown Manhattan.

The Journal has had many homes—on Wall Street, on Cortland Street, on Liberty Street. To the media world, it always felt like it was miles and miles away.

“I think it’s even more so that these people were not that eager to be famous,” said Richard Tofel, a former Journal editor who just completed a biography, Restless Genius, on Barney Kilgore. “The Journal has always been in the media world but not of it,” said Sarah Ellison, a Journal reporter who is on leave while she writes a book about Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Dow Jones. “There was the famous editor Barney Kilgore, who revolutionized the paper. Even though the paper was owned by an established New England family in the Bancrofts, the editors of the paper who brought it to life very much had an understated, Midwestern, aw-shucks attitude.”

Kilgore, an editor for decades at The Journal, is given credit for shaping the newspaper’s sensibilities.

No one at The Journal had any interest in being seen as a Personality.

"You never found Journal people at Elaine's," said Jim Stewart, the former Journal star.

“Honestly, The Journal was never part of the media bubble,” said Joanne Lipman, the former editor of Portfolio, which folded in April, who was a deputy managing editor at The Journal. “I actually don’t think the geography had anything to do with it—it’s the culture of the paper more than the geography.”

“For Murdoch, and for the new regime, this is the perfect time to push through a cultural change,” said a Journal editor. “It is a bad time for the industry, and I think people feel lucky to have jobs. For the most part, I think people realize the industry is in very bad shape, and relative to other publications, we’re lucky to have this kind of benefactor. As much change is happening at our paper, there’s so much change at other publications; people accept there has to be some change in order for this place to survive.”

“So far, with all of the trauma that’s been going on in the news business and particularly the newspaper business, The Journal has been insulated from most of it,” said Mr. Steiger, the former managing editor, “because Rupert’s been willing to spend major amounts of money.”

Next question: For how long?

jkoblin@observer.com

—Additional reporting by Lois Beckett and Dana Rubinstein