SERIAL NOVEL RUNS ON 'WALL ST. JOURNAL' SITE

By: Wayne Robins A Novel Use Of the Net On OpinionJournal.com


The opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal are many things: passionate, principled, provocative. Guided by the slogan "Free Markets, Free People," they can swell the heart of the blue-blooded conservative or plant a sword in the sternum of the bleeding-heart liberal.

But whatever one's opinion about the Journal's opinions, one constant has been that none dare called it fiction.

Since Memorial Day, however, the Dow Jones & Co. Inc. flagship has been running fiction on its free Web site, http://www.opinionjournal.com. Every Monday, the site posts a new chapter of "Amanda.Bright@Home," a serial by Danielle Crittenden.

The first installment launched simultaneously online and in the newspaper's Friday "Weekend Journal" section, where movie reviews, a wine column, and editorials tend to deal with less of the raw meat of politics and economics and more of what OpinionJournal.com Editor James Taranto calls "culture, broadly defined." Subsequent chapters have been dot-com only.

Amanda Bright is a post-feminist archetype: a highly educated, hard-driving alpha female who quits her job at the National Endowment for the Arts to stay home and raise children, experiencing the ambivalence and deprivations of a family now living on the salary of her husband, Bob, a U.S. Justice Department lawyer.

"I've long been intrigued by the whole phenomenon of professional women in their 30s, formerly very ambitious women who've been trained [to succeed in the corporate world] who quit their jobs to stay home with their kids," Crittenden said in a phone interview from her home in Washington. She is married to David Frum, President Bush's economics policy speechwriter.

Crittenden also wrote the nonfiction book for the Amanda Generation, "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us," which dealt with Amanda issues -- about "women who put everything into their jobs, who found getting married, having children tough."

But why is Dow Jones, with its successful online subscription model, giving away "Amanda.Bright" on OpinionJournal.com?

It's all a matter of marketing and brand extension. "Editorial Page Editor Bob Bartley had the idea of launching OpinionJournal because he thought that there were readers on the Web who would be interested in what the editorial page of the Journal had to say, but who were not readers of The Wall Street Journal," said Melanie Kirkpatrick, assistant editor of the editorial page. Serial fiction aimed at the brigade of Bright Amandas "gives us a chance to reach a new audience of women, women at home," said Vickee Adams, director of corporate communications for the Journal.

Though not a direct revenue source, fiction was a staple of newspapers in the 19th century, when writers from Charles Dickens to Herman Melville created serial novels for newspapers. "There was value added: Everyone had the news, but your paper had Dickens," said M.J. Rose, who covers Internet publishing for Wired News.

One advantage of running fiction online, of course, is that it doesn't take precious space in what at many papers has become the "Incredibly Shrinking News Hole."

For another, it reassures readers that no matter how harsh the business climate, there is room for innovation and experimentation. One could even argue: Ars longa, declining profit margins brevis.



Wayne Robins (wrobins@editorandpublisher.com) is an associate editor covering new media for E&P.



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