From left: Les Hinton, Robert Thomson, Marcus Brauchli, and Rupert Murdoch.
Excerpted from War at the Wall Street Journal, by Sarah Ellison, to be published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; © 2010 by the author.
As the sun poured over the dingy blue carpeting in The Wall Street Journal’s ninth-floor newsroom, the New York bureau chiefs gathered around the conference table, with the foreign and domestic chiefs listening in on speakerphone. Flanked by his deputies, Marcus Brauchli was prepared to outline the paper’s latest direction under its new owner, Rupert Murdoch.
On the morning of April 7, 2008, Brauchli wore a bespoke suit—as was his custom—from the cut-rate De-Luxe Tailor Shop in Hong Kong, which he had frequented as a correspondent. Slim and attractive—his broad nose and boyish face belying his receding hairline—Brauchli had worked at the paper for 24 years, the vast majority of his professional life, first as a reporter in Asia, before moving up through its sharp-elbowed editing ranks in New York. Now back in the U.S. with his wife and their two young daughters, he had settled into the bureaucratic existence he once pretended to disdain. It was almost one year to the day after he had been named managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, the top newsroom post.
With eerie symbolic symmetry, the very day of Brauchli’s promotion had coincided with the date of Murdoch’s $5 billion bid for Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company. An exceedingly public three-month takeover saga followed, with Murdoch eventually reaching a deal—only after signing an agreement with its previous owner of more than a century, the Bancroft family, to protect the paper’s editorial independence. Shortly after Murdoch’s bid became public, Brauchli confided to a friend, “I work my whole career to get this job, and now I’m working for Murdoch?”
Within a short time, changes at the Journal had already become noticeable. Murdoch’s outspoken statements that there were too many editors at the paper—he was amazed that Journal stories were touched “an average of 8.3 times” before appearing in print—heightened existing anxieties about editorial changes and firings. Traditional “leders”—the long, narrative-driven, front-page stories that had been a Journal trademark—were disappearing in favor of shorter news stories. Brevity had become increasingly desirable, as was anything political. Coverage of the presidential primaries dominated the front page of a paper that had made its name with enlightening features on business and the economy.
Brauchli’s vision for the paper, conceived with previous publisher Gordon Crovitz—known in the newsroom as “Journal 3.0.”—dictated that the paper would break news on the pay-wall-protected wsj.com and follow up in the next day’s paper with analysis. But Brauchli was already having to backtrack. Murdoch wanted nothing of the arcana and subtlety of such a plan. He and his advisers had identified what they believed were the problems with American Journalism—it was too stuffy and too ponderous. British papers understood the value of a banner headline, and Murdoch preferred his news straight, not written in some dispassionate, analytical voice. A colleague had lamented that seven stories in a single day’s Journal began with the word “How.”
As the meeting began, the stressed-out Brauchli attempted to articulate his newest editorial philosophy, which he hoped would not be too distant from his new employer’s. “Every story on page one,” he told his bureau chiefs, “has to compete for space and length.” But even this mandate represented a break from the Journal’s past and gave Brauchli something of a credibility problem. His new message undermined the old one that he had forged when the paper was still under the ownership of the Bancroft family. This is what his life had become: a series of misfired communications and bureaucratic gatherings. As Brauchli led the meeting, the people in the room could overhear the occasional snicker coming from the speakerphone.
Engaging and charming one-on-one, Brauchli often felt uncomfortable in front of crowds, cracking obscure jokes and making casual remarks that sometimes left permanent scars. He was a constant planner, often weighing how to get his way while giving his audience the perception that they had gotten theirs. His promotion one year earlier had strained this strategy. He now had too many constituents to please, including Murdoch, whom he was determined to win over but, at the same time, carefully counter.
In the past few months, Brauchli had appeared pale and gaunt, constantly rushing to get somewhere else but never quite arriving. The editors who worked for him could barely get a moment alone to discuss a story—it seemed he was too preoccupied with the task of preserving his publication to actually run it. Brauchli had studied up on his subject, reading every Murdoch book he could get his hands on, including Full Disclosure, former Sunday Times of London editor Andrew Neil’s account of how Murdoch had courted and eventually shunned him. Despite the cautionary tale, Brauchli, like Neil, felt he would be the exception to the rule, the man to make it work with Murdoch. Though his belief in his own ability had been the key to his success, it was also a source of amusement for some editors.
Toward the end of the meeting that April morning, Brauchli checked his BlackBerry and noticed that he had a message from the new Journal publisher, Robert Thomson, the former editor of The Times of London, whom Murdoch had installed in the Journal offices as his eyes and ears. After announcing to his editors that he had to excuse himself and go to another meeting, Brauchli returned the call. “We have to go and talk to Les,” Thomson said, referring to Leslie Hinton, the Murdoch-appointed C.E.O. of Dow Jones. Hinton, who had just returned from China, had been with Murdoch virtually his entire career; he remembered fetching him sandwiches when the two were working at Murdoch’s first paper, the Adelaide News.
“Ni hao,” Brauchli said as they entered Hinton’s office, Mandarin for “Hello.” Hinton didn’t smile.
“There’s no easy way to put this,” Hinton said. “But we want you to step down as managing editor. We don’t think things are working out. We’d like to make a change.” Neither Hinton nor Thomson went into detail or explained why. Brauchli knew they were merely handing down a verdict arrived at by their boss.
Murdoch’s influence often began with installing a like-minded editor. He had dispensed with formidable editors at the Sunday Times (Neil, Harry Evans), New York magazine (Clay Felker), and others. As a student of history, Brauchli shouldn’t have been surprised. He had imagined this grim scenario a hundred times, even going as far as to liken himself to a soldier in Iraq who sees officers shot and wonders if the next bullet will be for him. Then he heard himself say, “I think it would be impossible for me to remain as editor if I don’t have the support of the owner.” His 24 years of climbing ended abruptly with that sentence. “I’ll do whatever I feel is in the best interests of the Journal as an institution, including stepping down if necessary. But I think you’re making a mistake.”
Thomson chimed in. “Don’t worry. We can take care of you financially.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Brauchli replied.
That night, Brauchli and Thomson, who had become friendly as young reporters in Asia, went out for a drink at Moran’s Irish bar, a nearby newsroom watering hole. “This makes no sense,” Brauchli said. He had been making changes to the paper, doing much of what he thought Murdoch wanted. But Thomson knew his boss too well. “The precipitating fact is the change in ownership,” he said. “It’s obvious.”
Brauchli had been telling people in the preceding weeks that editorships weren’t like rent-controlled apartments. “There are no squatter’s rights,” he would say. Now he had been cast out of the job he had worked for nearly a quarter of a century to obtain. His only remaining option was to negotiate how much his departure would be worth to Murdoch. He would say that it was his choice to leave, but he had some leverage. He soon hired Robert Barnett, the powerful Washington-based $975-an-hour lawyer, who counted as past clients the Clintons, the Bushes, and Sarah Palin.
Every new editor is deemed unworthy at the start, and Marcus Brauchli was no exception at The Wall Street Journal. He was much younger than some of his erstwhile rivals, and his methods sometimes left the vanquished feeling stung. “You have to remember how Marcus rose to power,” one colleague noted. “It wasn’t through building alliances; it was through proving that he was smarter than the rest of us.” Brauchli seemed younger than he was, too, and did little to dissuade others of the impression. He tried to remain chummy in the newsroom. While his predecessor, Paul Steiger, had taken a town car to work each morning, Brauchli still hopped on the subway, and if he ran into a junior colleague, he would regale the listener with his latest take on the economy or finance or the odd dinner he had had the night before.
Brauchli’s most important quality, however, on the morning of August 1, 2007—when Murdoch had agreed to buy The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family—was that he was one of those in the newsroom who knew and loved the old Journal and appreciated its traditional way of doing things. Though he had campaigned hard for his job—eventually outmaneuvering his Pulitzer-winning colleague Paul Ingrassia—and had made some sacrifices to get it (including spearheading an effort to shrink the width of the Journal, to save money), he was still a more trusted presence than the mogul uptown, who was now waiting for regulators in Washington to approve his latest purchase.
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