The Wall Street Journal and Editorial Quality

A while back Rupert Murdoch said he would make the Wall Street Journal a more general-audience publication. It's been going on for some time.

Recently they published an article titled, "Who Gets Drunk and Why" ? To be sure, it's one of the most popular (it's the most-read on wsj.com). But it's also not such a good article. First, the article isn't really business/econ/finance related. That's okay if they're trying to make the Journal a wider-audience publication. But, in contrast to interesting general-audience articles about drinking by the New York Times, the Journal article doesn't describe new research, and its interview with an expert gives us bland, non-newsworthy information:

Drinkers who think they can tell when they've had enough are very often wrong. "Alcohol can affect your reflexes even if you feel fine," says Samir Zakhari, director of the division of metabolism and health effects at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

The Journal article is a rehash of stuff we learned in middle school health-ed classes, peppered with a few anecdotal interviews. The only interesting bit in the article was this:

Women's menstrual cycles are yet another factor: Alcohol metabolism increases about 10% right after ovulation.

The Times article, in contrast, actually tells us something that may be interesting:

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has shown in several brain-imaging studies that people addicted to such drugs as cocaine, heroin and alcohol have fewer dopamine receptors in the brain’s reward pathways than nonaddicts. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter critical to the experience of pleasure and desire, and sends a signal to the brain: Pay attention, this is important.

When Dr. Volkow compared the responses of addicts and normal controls with an infusion of a stimulant, she discovered that controls with high numbers of D2 receptors, a subtype of dopamine receptors, found it aversive, while addicts with low receptor levels found it pleasurable.

This finding and others like it suggest that drug addicts may have blunted reward systems in the brain, and that for them everyday pleasures don’t come close to the powerful reward of drugs. There is some intriguing evidence that there is an increase in D2 receptors in addicts who abstain from drugs, though we don’t yet know if they fully normalize with time.

So what is my point? Mainly that the WSJ is indeed moving toward a general audience, but its editorial standards aren't up to snuff. Or else they are now trying to pander to an audience who didn't learn basic things in middle school.