Wall Street Journal to Adopt ‘Page Three Girl’ Concept
NEW YORK (Disassociated Press) August 2, 2007 – While Rupert Murdoch and the leaders of NewsCorp are insistent that The Wall Street Journal will remain editorially independent following the merger of the two entities, indications of a possible trend toward the tendency for ‘tabloidism’ are already beginning to surface, with the report that The Journal will borrow a page from The Sun, the UK tabloid that helped launch the rise of Murdoch and NewsCorp.
“Soon, The Journal will begin to feature its own version of ‘The Page Three Girl,’” a NewsCorp insider informed a Disassociated Press associate. ‘The Page Three Girl’ refers to a different topless young woman featured on the third page of each edition of The Sun going back to the early 1970s. ‘The Page Three Girl’ segment was introduced shortly after Murdoch acquired The Sun. Critics of Murdoch claim that this was the beginning of a trend at The Sun toward sensationalist journalism, a criticism that has followed Murdoch with regard to most of the media properties that NewsCorp has either acquired or launched.
According to the source, The Journal’s ‘Page Three Girl’ will not be a photograph but rather a sketch, in keeping with The Journal’s longstanding tradition with regard to the depiction of images; and will focus on renderings of the interpretations of how women who are making headlines in the business world might appear topless, in the minds of The Journal’s sketch artists.
“We think it will be a good way to prepare people for what’s going to come when we launch The Wall Street Journal Network,” the insider concluded.
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