Wall Street Journal adds a sports page p. 13

By: Tony Case

Wall Street Journal adds a sports page p. 13

THE WALL STREET Journal predicted the recent Pittsburgh-San Diego football game would be one of the "dullest conference finals in memory" ? and Bernie Lincicome of the Chicago Tribune wondered whether Steelers coach Bill Cowher gave a hoot.
"I don't read the Wall Street Journal," huffed Cowher, whose team was defeated.
He might reconsider now that the paper, best known for its daily financial and business news report, has started a weekly sports page as part of its expanded weekend-oriented coverage.
"This is the first step in an effort to build into the Friday paper more interesting features for readers," said weekend editor Lee Lescaze. "The idea is to give readers on Friday materials that will cause them to hang onto the paper after the workday, take it home and enjoy it over the weekend."
The Journal modeled the page, which carries stories by two full-time reporters as well as a column, after its analyses of the 1992 and 1994 Olympics and last summer's World Cup. The section may be expanded in the future, Lescaze said.
The paper is looking to increase reportage of other lifestyle topics, such as personal finance and art collecting, and next month plans to launch a weekly travel page.
Its sports report differs from typical coverage in that it concentrates on upcoming events rather than yesterday's scores and highlights ? and, this being the Journal, there's nary a photo.
"The metro dailies publish sports sections every day of the week, and I think we'd be foolish, with only one page a week, to try to do stories that appeared elsewhere or had developed through the week," Lescaze explained. "No matter how dramatic they may have been, they'll be old by Friday."
Because the 1.8-million-circulation Journal, the largest U.S. newspaper, has a genuinely coast-to-coast readership, it must try to appeal to a wide array of sports enthusiasts, all with their favorite regional athletics and hometown teams.
"We have to avoid . . . writing endlessly about the Knicks or the Bulls," said Lescaze, noting the broadsheet is based in New York City and sports columnist Frederick C. Klein is in Chicago. "We've got to keep moving around the country, to appeal to a national audience."
As one would expect from a publication catering to the pinstripe-and-wingtip set, the Journal treats professional sports as the lucrative enterprise it has become. Its coverage, so far, has had more to do with team owners and salary caps than star quarterbacks and their gridiron conquests.
The premi?re section, on Jan. 6, offered as its lead story a profile of the longtime proprietors of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns, teams that battled each other in a playoff game that weekend.
The story lamented the extent to which pro football had changed since the late Art Rooney acquired the Steelers in 1933 for a piddling $2,500, pointing out that nowadays this amount "wouldn't cover one Sunday's Gatorade bill."