Steiger Takes 'Wall St. Journal' Home

By: Wayne Robins When the downturn in the newspaper industry hit The Wall Street Journal hard last year, Managing Editor Paul E. Steiger made a tough call: He dumped some mutual funds.

No, he didn't sell mutual funds. Using the potent number-crunching capability of the newspaper and its parent, Dow Jones & Co. Inc., he "streamlined some stats," as he puts it, to save the newspaper a significant amount in costs.

"We found that mutual funds with less than $50 million in assets accounted for one-third of our listings," Steiger recalls, in his temporary office closer to cash-and-carry Canal Street than stock-and-bond Wall Street. Listings -- stocks, options, futures, mutual funds -- are a core element of Steiger's paper: That's why they call it The Wall Street Journal. But all that minimally sized agate takes up a lot of space, and Steiger's research showed that $50-million-and-under funds represented only 2% of assets under management. So he got rid of them.

"We set a floor," Steiger explains. By doing so, the Journal essentially required one less page each day. Steiger estimates that, depending on the price of newsprint, that decision saves the Journal $2 million annually during these Years of the Pinched Pennies.

Fear not, fund fans: There are still more than four pages of mutual-fund listings in the Journal each day. But Steiger is taking the Journal far beyond the financial markets. He is directing an ambitious push to make the Journal more colorful (literally and figuratively), more useful, and more youthful -- first, through the "Weekend Journal" (founded in 1998), and, since April, via the new "Personal Journal" and a widely publicized Page One makeover.

Mensch at work

Plans for additional color, a new front-page design, and the debut of "Personal Journal" all had been set a year ago for this April 9, says Joanne Lipman, the deputy managing editor who helped create "Weekend Journal" and oversees "Personal Journal." The top-secret prototype was called Project 2002, she explains, "and all the pieces existed in one room at 200 Liberty Street."

But on Sept. 11, "amid all the other crises," Lipman says, "we lost a great deal of the work that had been done. We had to reconstruct and move ahead on this enormous project at the same time we were undergoing this incredible stress, losing our office building, the Danny [Pearl] situation. ... But Paul kept us focused on April 9. We had to do it right."

Steiger stares stoically when the tribulations of the last year are mentioned.

First, the Journal lost its home on Liberty Street in the World Financial Center, a now-haunted whisper from Ground Zero. But the Journal's staff survived when the airplanes of doom struck the World Trade Center, though there were hours of uncertainty as staffers scrambled by foot or by ferry (yet still managed to earn the Journal the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for breaking-news reporting).

Steiger and the Journal suffered a twin trauma with the kidnapping and savage murder of its reporter, Danny Pearl, in Pakistan this year. Steiger was point man for the Journal, even negotiating publicly and, ultimately, futilely with the barbarians, to spare Pearl's life.

But what was most remarkable about Steiger's leadership, according to people who work with him, was his ability to maintain his focus on the Journal's future while under duress.

Talking to some Journal staffers about their personal feelings about Steiger, one comes away believing that an equity stake in Berkshire Hathaway could not persuade them to badmouth the man. Both Lipman and Kara Swisher, the "Boom Town" columnist out of the San Francisco bureau, use the same word to describe him: "Mensch," that colloquially perfect Yiddish word that can be roughly defined as a good, kind, thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate, caring, decent human being.

"I am a big Paul fan, especially coming from elsewhere, because he seems to spend a lot more time than I was used to interacting with reporters," Swisher says in an e-mail message from her home in the Bay Area, where she is on maternity leave. "That's important because we are all so far-flung and could feel isolated." When two people out of a staff of about 20 were laid off at the San Francisco office, Swisher says, both Steiger and Deputy Managing Editor Daniel Hertzberg visited the bureau personally to discuss the upsetting news.

Steiger also gets credit for empowering his editors and reporters, allowing them to "float and try out new ideas," as Swisher puts it. Lipman agrees. When Steiger decided to revive long-delayed plans for a fourth section (which became "Weekend Journal"), Lipman says she and designer Joe Dizney were given the time and resources to pursue their dream: "He gave us the freedom of just months in a room brainstorming, what would we like to see. But he is such a great editor that if he didn't like something, he'd judiciously say, 'Why don't we think about doing it this way instead?'"

Getting 'Personal'

The harbinger of the paper's newfound flair, the "Weekend Journal," was a smash out of the box when it made its debut March 30, 1998. Like most Friday feature sections, it focuses on the arts, entertainment, and travel. But its flexible design, directed by Dizney, brightened the Journal's charcoal-gray image, with a buoyancy that makes similar sections at other dailies look as complacent and formula-driven as they too often are. One of the section's biggest draws: a refreshingly nonsnooty wine column -- the authors recently sampled wine lists at chain restaurants such as Applebee's and Hooters.

"Weekend Journal" is also an undisguised attempt to stretch the Journal's readership, to appeal to young businessmen and businesswomen. On the other hand, of course, it can't be so far-out that a longtime reader, that archetypical Stuffy Starchcollar (Mr. Starchcollar to you, sonny) would wonder: What the heck is this?

"The first thing was, it had to work with our existing audience," says Steiger, 59, an affable straight shooter with a jutting jaw and jocular style. "If we attracted a bunch of new people and alienated a lot of the old people, it would have been a loser. But, in fact, our more mature readers are great fans of 'Weekend,' and that was one of the very pleasant results I hadn't expected."

The high level of acceptance of "Weekend Journal" begat "Personal Journal," the Tuesday-to-Thursday news-you-can-use section, that came out of the chute April 9. "It's aimed at the businessman or businesswoman in their consuming side, their individual side," Steiger says. The typical Journal reader is used to making decisions at work. "Personal Journal" offers tools for those people to make decisions at home.

"Our staff is used to dealing with really complex business issues in a way that's simple and easy to understand, and can move quickly," Steiger says. "So we decided we'll do personal journalism, but in a different way. We'll key off trends and news developments, we'll move fast, to tell you how to take advantage of something, or avoid something, right now, as it's happening."

Referring to the radical (for the Journal) Page One redesign, Steiger says, "I think our readers are seeing it the way we did. This is not a transformation of the soul of the paper -- it's adapting to reality. We didn't want to be the first paper with color, or the second, or the tenth or the fiftieth or the hundredth. But it's part of the idiom that everyone uses. It's not about making the paper prettier -- it's about making the paper easier to use." It better be: The changes of April 9 marked the culmination of four years of planning and an investment of $225 million by Dow Jones.

Looking homeward

Steiger hopes to lead his troops back to their headquarters on Liberty Street, once he and his bosses at Dow Jones are assured of the building's structural and environmental safety. The goal is this August. But it will be strange.

"When we moved into that building, we were one of the first tenants, and it was lonely," Steiger says. "And it wasn't a great place to be. Then Battery Park City [a nearby residential development] made it one of the nicest parts of New York. When we go back, we know: It's not going to be one of the nicest places in New York. It will be difficult for some people, a lot of our people. I, myself, will never forget seeing people jumping or falling from those towers. But I feel a certain responsibility, that it's got to be safe, but also to not let terrorists decide who's going to be where in Manhattan. And to do our part to help rebuild lower Manhattan."

The Journal, however, has always been decentralized, given the worldwide scope of coverage provided by its well-staffed bureaus. Complementing its Asian and European editions, the U.S. product is printed in some 17 regional locations.

That helped the paper to publish on Sept. 12, as a squadron led by Dow Jones' Chief Technology Officer Bill Godfrey turned the company's South Brunswick, N.J., offices -- then occupied by what Felicity Barringer of The New York Times called "mostly back-office and accounting professionals, not journalists" -- into a newsroom. The ad hoc transformation was swift and effective.

"Remember, fully half of our reporters aren't in New York, anyway," Steiger says. "We have a San Francisco bureau with nearly 20 people, a Los Angeles bureau with almost as many, Chicago has a dozen. ... We're not a New York paper, we're a U.S. newspaper and more and more global all the time."

Just a few weeks ago, work was completed on a state-of-the-art newsroom in South Brunswick, where the copy-editing and pagination for all editions of the Journal are now and will continue to be located. "It's a very ambitious operation," Steiger observes, "and having an appropriate collaboration with those folks when you can't just look up and shout at them, it's going to be a challenge. But we'll do it."

Split personalities

The Journal has been facing that challenge in the diaspora since Sept. 11. Steiger's New York journalists are in a different part of the city than the "Opinion" staff, its temporary quarters being on Seventh Avenue, in the Garment District. The distance between the two staffs is as meaningful as it is symbolic. Steiger, as managing editor of the newspaper, reports directly to Peter R. Kann, publisher of the paper and chairman and CEO of Dow Jones. The opinion pages are run by the newspaper's editor, Robert L. Bartley, and Paul A. Gigot, editor of the editorial page. They, too, report to Kann.

The opinion pages are not under Steiger's purview, so he is not the one to praise or curse for the foaming at the mouth over the sins of Bill Clinton and all the other "left-wingers" who don't toe the Journal's "free markets, free people" party line. When a reporter tells Steiger that his young children sometimes watch the editorial staff's weekly Friday-night program on CNBC, Steiger chuckles: "Getting subsumed with all this right-wing stuff, eh?"

More seriously, Steiger clarifies the unusual distinction between opinion and news at the Journal. "The difference between the Journal and The New York Times is that the tone of their editorial page is more closely aligned with their news pages," he says. "Our editorial page is unusual in American journalism in that it is one of the few that actually sells newspapers. It has a strong following, but it also has people who hate it.

"Some of our readers will write me and say, 'Have your reporters read your editorial page!' And other people wrote Bob and Paul and said, 'How can you treat President Clinton so unconscionably?' But that's all fine. You get two newspapers for the price of one."

A 'sports freak'

There aren't many personal effects in Steiger's temporary office, but one curiosity stood out: an Allen Iverson bobblehead doll, a gift from a colleague in South Brunswick. "We call Paul our 'executive sports editor,'" Lipman says (the paper has no such position). Steiger calls himself "a sports freak." He'll watch anything, even jai alai, "for 20 minutes or so."

Although it seems that Steiger has been at the Journal forever -- in fact, almost 20 years -- he once left the paper for another job. A Yale University graduate, he became a reporter in the Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1966, then jumped to the Los Angeles Times in 1968. Steiger was named the L.A. Times' business editor in 1978 before going back to the Journal, first as associate managing editor (1983), then as deputy managing editor (1985). He has been the managing editor since 1991.

Steiger is said to have flirted with leaving the Journal in 1999, when he was offered the presidency of CNNfn, ultimately turning down a reported $1-million-a-year offer. Steiger has won three Gerald Loeb awards and two John Hancock awards for his own business and economics writing, and the Journal has won 12 Pulitzer Prizes during his time as managing editor.

Home delivery

On his wish list, Steiger would like to see "The Wall Street Journal Sunday" -- an insert carried by 60 newspapers with a combined circulation of more than 10 million, according to a Dow Jones spokesman -- increase its exposure. "It's something that just got started a couple of years ago [in September 1999], and I think it's a real sleeper," Steiger says. "It takes advantage of our ability to cover personal finances and markets, whereas it's tough for general-interest newspapers to devote the resources to duplicate that."

When the budget for overall editorial is replenished as the economic recovery unfolds, Steiger plans to enhance the paper's international coverage by expanding the global reporting staff. "Because of tight economic times, I haven't been able to fill some of the vacancies overseas," he says. "I feel it pressing in on me right now."

The other area where Steiger would increase coverage is health, broadly defined: "That is a perfect terrain for us: legislation issues, Medicare/drug benefits, drug prices, all those issues playing off against each other. That makes for a tremendous coverage domain of interest to everybody, but business and upper-income people have more choices to make, and that's our natural audience, so that's an area we're expanding significantly even under this tough economic environment, and we'll continue to expand that in the future."

But "Personal Journal" and "Weekend Journal" and the demographic reach they represent are keys to building the Journal franchise, making it a newspaper you take home instead of leaving at the office. Steiger bases this approach on personal experience.

"I never even read The Wall Street Journal until the day before my first job interview," Steiger says, referring to that day back in 1966. Despite his lack of familiarity with the product, he got the job.

"My father was comptroller of a small publishing company," says Steiger, who grew up in suburban Stamford, Conn., "and when he came home from work, he brought four or five newspapers -- The New York Times, the World-Telegram & Sun, the Daily News, and sometimes the Journal-American and the Herald Tribune. The Wall Street Journal wasn't one of them." However, he hastens to add, "If The Wall Street Journal is around people's households, the next generation is more likely to pick it up."