Romenesko

IWantMedia.com
That's what Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff says. "It was certainly mid-'90s in that the Journal kind of disappeared. The Journal went out of the conversation as a point of influence other than the eccentricities of its editorial page. It seemed to if not stop existing at least stop mattering. ...It feels to me from a journalist standpoint something of a puzzle and a little bit of a tragedy. And I think that the answer is the online thing. I think the fact that the Journal felt that it was powerful enough to charge, and for a long time everyone regarded the Journal's activities online as the ultimate. They had unlocked the puzzle. In fact, I don't think they did. I think they locked themselves into a puzzle."