Updated Journal writes its future

IF you don’t subscribe to the Wall Street Journal but care about the future of news and newspapers, it’s worth picking up a copy of that freshly redesigned paper and taking a look.

It will be time well spent, even if you can’t tell a futures contract from a hedge fund and keep your savings under the mattress. At 118 years of age and with more than 2 million demanding readers to consider, the Journal, with its designers and editors, has done a lot more than spiff up with color and graphics and all the usual bells and whistles that people will call “updated” for the next five minutes.

What Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz, Managing Editor Paul E. Steiger and their colleagues have done is give us a good first look at what a rational division of labor will look like as newspapers move toward a future in which they simultaneously connect with their readers online and in print. (Full disclosure: Steiger and I were friendly colleagues when we worked together here at The Times some years ago.)

New media triumphalists and old media traditionalists have for too long insisted that newspaper journalism’s future has to belong almost entirely to one or the other. What the redesigned Journal strongly suggests is that newspapers will be of greatest service to their readers by taking a simultaneous and complementary stance in both venues. That means delivering on a daily basis an online newspaper that is mostly -- but not entirely -- given over to breaking news and up-to-date factual content freshened on a continuing basis, and a print newspaper that is essentially -- but not totally -- devoted to analysis, context and an exploration of the important back story.

This balanced, and rather convincing, notion of how to proceed through this era of wrenching journalistic transition is like a breath of adult sobriety in an ongoing discussion of the journalistic future that usually seems to demand that we all choose between amnesia and panic.

There was a bit of a demonstration over the last week on how this two-track future may work itself out. The story of Saddam Hussein’s execution was, to a large extent, a perfect new media event. Some of the most gripping images were surreptitiously recorded with camera phones. (One man’s citizen journalist is another’s spy, it seems.) In any event, those images ricocheted across the Web and onto cable television news in the middle of the night, North American time, hours after the next morning’s print newspapers had gone to bed. By the next day, those grim photos and video were everywhere, somber testament to the fact that a condemned man, even an unquestionably evil one, always looks better than his executioners.

Meanwhile, the story of President Ford’s death and state funeral was a quintessential print story, since assessing the former chief executive’s place in our history, which is what the situation required, demanded nuanced blends of recollection, analysis and appraisal. In other words, the kind of thoughtful and reflective presentation in which print still excels.

In a way, when you put these two stories up against the blueprint the redesigned Journal proposes, the way forward for American newspapers seems rather familiar to those who have lived through its recent past. Essentially, what may be unfolding is a back-to-the-future story. Traditionally, American newspapers were divided into AM (morning) and PM (afternoon). The AMs put an intense emphasis on breaking news, presented as economically and freshly as possible; the PMs emphasized analysis, good writing, thoughtful projections about what might come next in the world around us. The Journal’s concept suggests that every newspaper will have to go back into the AM (now online) and PM (now print) business.

THAT’S not an entirely unimportant distinction, because it suggests that the future will involve journalistic conventions already proved to act in the public’s interest, spread across new venues. Given the profound crisis of confidence the current era of technological change has triggered in many newspaper executives and among media company investors, the notion that a workable future relies on skills of proven integrity and utility ought to sober everybody up.

In fact, a few of the principles the Journal’s designer, Mario R. Garcia, said he kept in mind as he overhauled the paper are points that ought to reassure newspaper readers about their medium’s future and give some of the giddier executives and editors some cause for thought:

* “Create a hierarchy of stories, so readers know the relative importance of news. The size of headlines and the placement of stories within the architecture of a page should make it clear to readers what stories matter most, to help them prioritize their reading.

* “Remember that ... readers come to read, not to look.

* “Don’t skimp on good journalism. In an era when information is often truncated for fast digestion, the Journal’s Page One stories are refreshing for their authority, depth and completeness.”

These are principles that take into account the reality that what we’ve casually come to label the Information Age is really a “data age.” We’re literally bathed in data, especially on the Web, but painfully short of information, which is data verified and set in a comprehensible and useful context. We all live, as the neurologist Oliver Sacks has pointed out, in a historic moment characterized by a general increase in knowledge and a decrease in understanding.

The future we can glimpse in the Wall Street Journal’s valuable and rather audacious experiment suggests just how strong a role there is still to be played by newspapers willing to accept the challenge of recalibrating the balance between data and information, between knowledge and understanding. Accepting that challenge and the demands it will make for increased investment in change is likely to define our notions of journalistic service to the common good in the years ahead.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com