did you know the Wall Street Journal reporters went on strike?

[donsu]

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/media/n_10217/index.html

You have nothing to lose but your jobs. Angered by cuts to their health plans and raises to their high-living superiors, Wall Street Journal reporters take to the streets.

E S. Browning isn’t exactly Norma Rae. He’s no Trotskyite, either. He writes a dispassionate column about the markets for the Wall Street Journal’s “Money and Investing” section. In his bow tie, sweater vest with a little hole in the seam, and a blazer thrown over his shoulder in the sunshine, he wouldn’t stand out on a commuter-train platform of middle-class information professionals.

But on April 7, it was hard to miss Browning behind the barricades outside the Dow Jones headquarters in the World Financial Center. There were close to 100 Dow Jones employees with him, chanting ineptly (they kept trailing off), with signs around their necks (IS THIS THE WAL-MART JOURNAL?). If you happened by, Browning would make sure you knew what was going on. “This kind of thing has never happened here in these numbers,” he said.

“A lot of people confuse the paper’s reporters with its editorial page,” said business-travel columnist Ron Lieber, who had been blowing a whistle.

Which isn’t to say that the Wall Street Journal has turned into boot camp for class warriors. Most of the picketers were in suit jackets, checking their messages on their cell phones. It was clear by their uncomfortable smiles that none of them really wanted to be there—if it’s possible to picket in quotation marks, they were. Officially, they were protesting management’s contract offer—a small raise paired with a demand that they help pay for increased health-insurance costs. But they were motivated by the perception that something was changing irrevocably at a company known for being both meritocratic and paternalistic. Get them started and they’ll blame the dual monarchy of Dow Jones chairman and chief executive Peter Kann and his wife, Journal publisher Karen Elliott House. Especially after it was revealed in the company’s proxy report released a couple of weeks before that they both got huge pay raises—58 and 32 percent, respectively.

“Peter and Karen together got $5 million in salary, bonus, and stock,” said Browning to the assembled picketers. “Which, if you add it up, is what they want to take away from us in health care!”

Everybody booed.
-snip-
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this is a long article and ends: There’s some feeling on the floor that the paper has become a poaching ground: Last week, Gasparino took an offer from Newsweek. The Times already stole health-care reporter Gardiner Harris, “Weekend Journal” editor Amy Virshup, and real-estate reporter Motoko Rich in the past year. More ominously, this winter, the Times hired popular Journal associate managing editor Larry Ingrassia to remake its business coverage. Some at the Journal are waiting for the call.


hhmmmm

[Norquist Nemesis]

1. Maybe Bush will pull a Reagan

and bust the union like he did the air traffic controllers. He needs the WSJ to speak the message. *wink*

[BlueEyedSon]

2. Yup, big ad on the OpEd page of the NYTimes

[KissMyAsscroft]

3. Aren't they a very conservative newspaper?

Seems like poetic justice to me to see them whining about healthcare.