First Look at New Mini Wall Street Journal
From Editor and Publisher magazine:
L. Gordon Crovitz, publisher of the Journal, yanked aside a giant white curtain to reveal a new front page that retains many of the same elements as are in the paper today. There's just less of it.
"Our goal is ambitious," Crovitz told the 50 or so reporters and photographers covering the event, "we are the first to rethink what a newspaper is."
A smaller format newspaper will be a problem--advertisers won't want to pay the same for less.
When I was at the Financial Times, the Technology supplement that was published monthly was redesigned into a tabloid size to save printing costs. Advertisers balked at paying the same price for a full page ad in the new format as in the old. Less is not more when it comes to newspaper ads.
My advice to Dow Jones is get rid of the subscription firewall for the online WSJ for yesterday's news. Take advantage of the free distribution by bloggers and others. That will establish your content as a top news source. Charge for news today not for yesterday's fish wrap.
