Wall Street Journal

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

Few things are more entertaining than watching a debating pro run rings around an opponent. Just ask the witnesses to an encounter staged Friday between Gov. Jerry Brown  and Robert Thomson, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. The event was the keynote of the Journal's annual three-day ECO:nomics conference for “green” investors. The Australian Thomson, Rupert Murdoch's handpicked Journal boss, was seemingly intent on getting Brown to endorse some of the Journal's editorial favorites, such as nuclear power and the controversial natural gas extraction technique known as fracking.

No one wants to utter the word "depression." But the truth of the matter is that the American economy may be entering a state of free fall. Every day brings more bad news about the sub-prime mortgage debacle, about home foreclosures, construction industry slowdowns, a credit drought for consumers and businesses, oil price shocks and the open-ended devaluation of the dollar. Where is it all leading?

Anonymous Kollektiv, a German group claiming ties to the shadowy hacker group Anonymous, signalled out the Wall Street Journal today as the target of a crowd sourced "comments" flash mob. To be clear: No servers were brought down, the Wall Street Journal's site didn't go dark and no reporter's sensitive source list was hacked. Instead, hundreds of people posted a relatively mild paragraph in the comment section on various Facebook pages run by the Journal, suggesting that the paper was trying to stir up fear in Americans by comparing Anonymous to Al Qaeda.

In the Wall Street Journal that Rupert Murdoch took over in 2007, one regular feature was the "tick tock," an inside-the-boardroom reconstruction of a big deal. Three years after the News Corp. chairman defied business logic and bid $5.6 billion for Dow Jones, the Journal's supposedly impregnable proprietor, the journalist who covered the deal for the paper has served up a book as devastatingly definitive as any Journal tick tock. Her account comes 18 months after Michael Wolff, a veteran mogul chronicler, delivered his portrait of Murdoch's quixotic deal, "The Man Who Owns the News."

Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal reporter with a flair for inspirational stories who produced three nonfiction bestsellers, beginning with the 2008 book "The Last Lecture" about life lessons from a dying man, was killed in a car crash Friday. He was 53. Zaslow's death was announced on the website of Detroit's Fox 2 News, where his wife, Sherry Margolis, is an anchor. Zaslow was driving on a snow-covered highway in northern Michigan when he lost control and was hit by a truck.

Dow Jones & Co. will begin publishing a weekend edition of its flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, beginning Sept. 10, 2005, the company said. The paper has been published on weekdays for the last 51 years. It came out six days a week from its inception in 1889 until 1953, when the New York Stock Exchange ended Saturday stock trading. The Saturday paper will be delivered to subscribers at no additional charge, the company said.

Dow Jones & Co. said it will raise the newsstand price for its flagship Wall Street Journal to $1 from 75 cents beginning April 2, the first rate increase since 1990. The Journal's annual $175 subscription price, set in January 1997, will be unaffected. The increase would generate about $8.8 million in revenue the rest of this year, assuming newsstand sales are maintained.

Jeff Cole, a well-respected aerospace editor and reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was killed Wednesday in the crash of a small plane outside Denver. He was 50. Cole, who according to the Journal was on a reporting assignment, was a passenger in a jet piloted by Michael A. Chowdry, chairman and chief executive of Atlas Air Inc. Chowdry also died in the crash and subsequent fire, which is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. Paul E.

Dow Jones & Co., continuing management changes that began last year, on Thursday promoted Paul E. Steiger to managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. He succeeds Norman Pearlstine, who has been appointed executive editor. Steiger, 48, has been deputy managing editor since 1985, but for more than a year he has been effectively running the newspaper on a daily basis. Pearlstine has been managing editor since November, 1983. The management changes take effect Monday.

Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal reporter with a flair for inspirational stories who produced three nonfiction bestsellers, beginning with the 2008 book "The Last Lecture" about life lessons from a dying man, was killed in a car crash Friday. He was 53. Zaslow's death was announced on the website of Detroit's Fox 2 News, where his wife, Sherry Margolis, is an anchor. Zaslow was driving on a snow-covered highway in northern Michigan when he lost control and was hit by a truck.

A roundup of entertainment headlines for Friday. Van Halen played a private show for journalists and music industry insiders at a tiny club in Greenwich Village Thursday night. ( Wall Street Journal ) Will.i.am is becoming a car maker? ( Wall Street Journal ) Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox, Robin Williams and Vinnie Jones star in the new trailer for... the Oscars ( Los Angeles Times ) Doctors say Nick Cannon is likely suffering from acute kidney failure, a "silent" disease.

The race is for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, but it's really a referendum on Wall Street. On one side is Democrat Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and an inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street movement. On the other: incumbent Republican Scott Brown, one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from the financial industry. Brown is campaigning on traditional Republican themes of smaller government and lower taxes.

The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal claimed two high-ranking executives running the company's U.S. and British operations as Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch tried to stem the fallout from a growing crisis he had been downplaying. The resignations of longtime Murdoch intimates Les Hinton as chief executive of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of its Wall Street Journal and Rebekah Brooks as chief of News International in London came hours apart Friday. Hinton was in charge of News International and Brooks was editor of its News of the World when many of the hacking incidents are alleged to have occurred.

The only sort of power a news organization can wield safely is the power to persuade. Every other sort — no matter how high-minded or expedient the reason for taking it up — is a kind of slow poison that twists the souls of the journalists involved and, ultimately, makes their enterprise dangerously self-interested and unaccountable. That's the fundamental lesson to be taken from the spectacle of the Murdoch meltdown now underway in London. The 80-year-old Australian-born Rupert Murdoch is the unrivaled press baron of our era, who through his acquisitive will and insatiable avarice has assembled a media empire, News Corp., that spans the globe.

The deepening scandal surrounding the London tabloid News of the World is being covered very differently by the media outlets of News Corp. — owner of the paper — and their chief rivals. The home page of the New York Times on Friday morning was splashed with stories about the phone-hacking scandal, including a piece about the arrest of a former aide to British Prime Minister David Cameron; an analysis of the Tory government's connection to News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch; a profile of Rebekah Brooks, the embattled chief executive of News International, Murdoch's British publishing group; a piece about News of the World staffers; and an article about the public uproar in Britain.

Reporters at the Wall Street Journal, who pride themselves on their paper's thoughtful and high-quality journalism, reacted with near horror Tuesday at the prospect of having Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. as an owner.

NEW YORK (AP) — The Wall Street Journal is the largest U.S. newspaper. Its average weekday circulation is 2.1 million. That's according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which released newspaper circulation figures Monday for the six months through March. USA Today is at No. 2 with 1.8 million, and The New York Times is third with more than 900,000 on average Monday to Friday. The Times has the most circulation on Sundays, with 1.3 million. The circulation numbers are not comparable with the figures from last year because of new rules governing what counts as circulation.

Washington's top leaders insist they want to resolve this year’s budget crisis and want the federal government to stay open after Friday’s deadline. But that doesn’t mean they can easily negotiate the political minefield to reach compromise. Recent polls show most Americans want a compromise to avoid a government shutdown, but drilling down into the numbers shows that there are serious partisan divides that are fueling the tough stands being held by negotiators in their emergency meetings as the hours wind down to the deadline.