Changes on the Wall Street Journal Front Page

A report from Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism quantitatively shows the changes in the front page of the Wall Street Journal since Rupert Murdoch bought its parent company, Dow Jones. The paper has significantly decreased its business coverage while increasing the number of political stories. This is pretty interesting, as people buy the Journal for news of business, not politics. There's a significant increase in foreign coverage, which might be good, and I suspect it's difficult to say whether the WSJ would have increased political news on the front page anyway, as the primaries were ongoing. It would have been interesting to see a comparison not to the four months before the purchase, but the equivalent four months of the previous year, or even of four years before, when there was another U.S. presidential election. It would also have been good not to measure just "news holes," but the number of column inches uses, as well as the content of the paper overall. However, these are at least some numbers showing the changes.