Pretty in Khaki   

The Wall Street Journal spruces up its pages with color and consumer news.

The last old gray holdout of American journalism has disappeared. I'm writing of the Wall Street Journal and its recent makeover of its front page, which for the first time in history has color and multicolumn headlines.

The changes reflect the Journal's recognition that the newspaper business has changed dramatically, even for a national newspaper that has the country's strongest franchise for reporting and analyzing business and financial news.

Other newspapers, notably the New York Times, have likewise responded in recent years to the changes in journalism. Indeed, the expansion of business and financial coverage at the Times and at other large newspapers is a major factor in the Journal's effort to reach beyond its traditional readership of business executives.

Now, as befits the Journal, the modifications to its front page are subtle. The Journal has never been a newspaper that followed the suggestion of fan dancer Sally Rand, who told a convention of newspaper editors half a century ago that the foundation of her career was "the judicious use of white space." The Journal's front page is still densely packed with text. We don't see four-color photographs spread across two or three columns portraying the latest dizzy antics of some Hollywood celebrity. Instead, soft color, such as khaki and mint green, is used to enliven charts and references to stories inside.

The Journal's front page still includes its famous "leaders," major articles focusing on investigative reporting or deep analysis of some social or business trend. But there is more hard news, and now headlines can stretch two or three columns wide.

Also, the Journal has created a new consumer-oriented daily inside section called Personal Journal, which appears Tuesdays through Thursdays, Mondays being given over to special theme sections and Fridays to the Weekend Journal. In effect, this new section caps a years-long effort to make the Journal more attractive to a broader range of readers.

When I went to work in the 1960s for Dow Jones & Co., the Journal's parent, I took a job with the National Observer because I was loath to report on dividends, earnings and other business arcana. The Observer was a general interest weekly, and I figured I could spend all of my time writing "leader" type journalism.

Sadly, Dow Jones closed the Observer in 1977; its circulation never rose much above 500,000, and it never made money. It is an irony that the content that set apart the Observer from the Journal included coverage of the arts and entertainment and myriad other subjects that now take up substantial space in the Journal.

In its changes of recent years, the Journal has faced up to the dilemma the New York Times faced in the mid-1970s, although the underlying causes are somewhat different. The Times back then was nearing unprofitability because of sagging advertising and stagnant circulation. It was the classic Old Gray Lady, a paper full of hard news with only an occasional nod to other features.

Under the leadership of Editor A.M. Rosenthal, the Times added sections that covered such subjects as gardening, cooking and tests of household gadgets. The Times' editors had realized that the market for information had changed with the post-war growth in disposable income and leisure time. By addressing people's broader interests, the Times began to draw more readers and more advertising from companies seeking to sell related goods. Since beginning this strategy, and improving on it over the years (color was added in 1997), the Times' weekday circulation has grown 38 percent from the mid-1970s to today's 1.1 million, and Sunday circulation has increased by 19 percent to almost 1.7 million.

The Journal's circulation likewise grew in the early years of this period, but it peaked at slightly more than 2 million in 1983 and has slipped fairly steadily since then to today's 1.8 million. The Journal's problem stemmed partly from the rise of competing publications like Investor's Business Daily, the Financial Times and USA Today and the expanded business sections of major dailies.

Since that competition is not likely to go away, a logical strategy for the Journal was to widen its appeal. Peter Kann, Dow Jones' chief executive, has said, however, that the new Personal Journal "will not be a soft, feature-oriented package, but rather a news section, playing off current developments, but focusing on their personal business relevance."

It may be that the new Wall Street Journal really has become an "old semi-gray lady," but clearly the alterations signal that this most traditional of newspapers is responding to changes in the newspaper business.