When Rupert Murdoch bought the wall street journal, you kind of knew it was going to end looking more like USA Today than the WSJ of years past.

And so it begins... (http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/what_the_new_wsj_lacks.php)

I do find WSJ writers self-indulgent and feel that many of the stories I end up reading from the paper to be almost works of aspiring novelists in a way. I am not looking forward to the end of intensively investigated stories but I do believe the investigators get a bit too attached to their stories at times and I find skipping through portions, like skimming pages in a book where the writer allows themselves too much leeway in setting the scene, usually does not take away from the real story being conveyed.

Tengentially, I don't like the how many papers use "-" instead of commas for parenthetical statements. It's just nitpicky but it seems less professional.

BTW, the internet is the perfect medium for longer more developed pieces. Right now the immediacy of the blog and instant internet postings has the American newspaper business running around trying to keep up with how fast and loose the internet is. Once the instantaneousness of the internet is well established and old-hat, people will figure out that their 10,000 word soliloquies are much better suited to a medium that allows linking to the litany of references made in the piece as well as images, graphs, and other pictorial representations of the point being made. Journalists and investigators will be able to hold readers' hands as they guide down a link laden path they themselves forged in discovering and researching their story rather than just recite to them some of the notes they made on their investigation.

Bukdow? How did you get Fool's password?!

Once the instantaneousness of the internet is well established and old-hat, people will figure out that their 10,000 word soliloquies are much better suited to a medium that allows linking to the litany of references made in the piece as well as images, graphs, and other pictorial representations of the point being made. Journalists and investigators will be able to hold readers' hands as they guide down a link laden path they themselves forged in discovering and researching their story rather than just recite to them some of the notes they made on their investigation.

What I dread is the scenario where the resources to do lengthy investigative pieces dry up completely and we're left with only two varieties of story. Either the same rehashed wire story blurb that appears everywhere or the 10,000 word opinion piece with references limited to what the author could google.

I think the funding is a cyclical issue. When no one is doing the indepth reporting, people will figure out they can grab market share by ponying up for it to be done.