Sports in the Wall Street Journal?

Perhaps if the WSJ is looking to bring in its sort of analysis-based sports writing into a regular daily feature, it'd be a good thing.

I'm not sure how many people would lap up a steady diet of it, but there is potential there for some fascinating reading.

 

The Journal's deadline is approximately 8:30 p.m. ET. Nothing's over by then unless it's played at Wrigley Field or in Europe.
That anthology was a collection of columns by Frederick Klein, I think, from the 1970s and 1980s. Excellent stuff. He'd cover, say, the Super Bowl, write a column for Tuesday's Journal, and have an angle everyone else missed.

 

How did The National work around those deadlines? Yikes.

 

There were three editions, the early Cross-Country -- more or less a bulldog for non-metro areas -- and two in the evening one at about 11 p.m. and a chase following that.
The Cross-Country went out on the Dow Jones trucks with the Journal in many cases (things could differ from city to city). The trucks would come back for the later runs. And the National was generally, maybe in every case, printed elsewhere than the Journal, because it was a tab and ran color. The Journal didn't run color back in 1990-91.
Geez, was it that long ago?!

 

This will never happen. The few times the Journal dabbles in sports, it's for that reader who has to be reminded that the New York Yankees are a baseball team and that basketballs are round. These people are far more interested in the exchange rate or what the markets are doing in Korea.

 

Well, a New York Times story tomorrow (Jan. 29) says it's going to happen, along with a move to Midtown:

A couple of other highlights lower down:

 

Knowing its audience, what if the WSJ put a few feature stories on a page or two, but jumped them to the Internet, where the readers could enter a copy of their paper's bar code number, their own subscription number, etc. to read the past-deadline stuff?

Sure, that's difficult, but so is any reasonable alternative.

 

That might just work, Zebra. Or some sort of expanded online sports section. But I just don't see gamers in the Journal. It doesn't make sense, on a lot of levels. They only barely do next-day gamers on the news, aside from the very big stuff - most of what they do is really analysis, enterprise and features.
I suspect what we'll see is a lot of take-outs around the big games of the day/week, perhaps more business of sports stuff, maybe the occasional investigation, and a columnist or two. The sports equivalent of what they do now on economic news.

 

I can't imagine this is going to sell more papers, but there people in the world far wiser than I am.

 

Seems like the WSJ is more interested right now in attracting certain kinds of advertisers, and if running more sports-related stories helps it convince those advertisers -- or lure new ones -- that they'll reach a particular type of reader, then it is worth doing.

 

Someone actually is trying to grow a print product.

Never thought I'd see this happen in my lifetime.

 

Fixed, just in case you were alive during The National's brief run.