A Study On The Media Convergence Strategies Of The Wall Street Journal

Media convergence is the hottest strategy to address the media upheaval in nearly a decade. Newspapers representative of traditional media are the greatest losers of the21st Century media. The metropolitan dailies that used to define American journalism are faced with the collapse of their business models, with their Internet rivals leading the news commercialization and cutting the ads costs deeply. Media convergence is regarded as the best solution to the uncertain future of newspapers in the digital media era. As the world's premier business publication, the Wall Street Journal's total paid circulation has held the largest since2007among American newspapers. The Wall Street Journal in the digital era delivers contents not only via newspapers, but also via newswires, websites, videos, apps, newsletters, magazines, proprietary databases, conferences, etc., with the courage to embrace the challenges and opportunities of new media and to explore ways of newspaper media convergence. Hence our worthwhile study.This dissertation is a case study about the Wall Street Journal's media convergence strategies. By means of various research methods such as literature reviews, content analysis, surveys and a longitudinal study, as well as theories of communication and media convergence, strategic management theories and modern organization theories, the paper exposes the analysis, choice and implementation of the Wall Street Journal's media convergence strategies. Firstly, the literature review sorts out the existing theoretical and empirical researches on media convergence, in which theoretical studies mainly include three aspects:building the theoretical framework of media convergence, macro-analysis of the media convergence motivations and the micro research of convergent news. And the core of media convergence practice research focuses on the media reforms under the background of media convergence, especially with the integration of telecommunications networks, cable TV networks and the Internet.Secondly, the paper diachronically elaborates the Journal's125years'history of media convergence:pre-convergence period, the periods of Clarence W. Barron, Bernard Kilgore, Warren Phillips, Peter R. Kann and Rupert Murdoch, with the focus of the main convergence events and features. Then, from the four perspectives of political&legal environment, economic environment, social&cultural environment and technological environment, the paper expounds the external strategy environment of the Journal's media convergence. Moreover, with a detailed presentation of the Journal's internal resources, it analyses the core competitiveness of the Journal with the VRIO model:brand, content and audience, and then puts forward the strategic target of the Journal's media convergence, i. e."The Wall Street Journal Everywhere".Next, the paper illustrates the Journal's media convergence choice from two aspects: journalistic convergence strategies including content convergence(convergent expansion of report range, multimedia content presentation, video strategy, custom content, brand content extension&integration, user-generated content, platform convergence, team report and individual report of multi-skilling journalists, globalization&localization) and terminal convergence(WSJ. com everywhere, video terminals, social network, mobile terminals); and economic convergence strategies including convergence of "Paywall" model and free model, global ads sales networks and convergent ads, platform ads sales, video ads, native ads, events marketing, databases marketing and diversification strategy in eight aspects.Then, on the implementation of the Journal's media convergence strategies, the paper first addresses the Journal's organization structure and editorial workflow, and then details the Journal's implementation process of the convergence strategy in four aspects: organization system, and resources configuration, and knowledge management and communication, as well as the construction of convergence-friendly cultures. Besides, the paper summarizes the important convergence concepts of the Journal:creating audience experience at the intersection of content and technology; from print first to digital first, and then to mobile first; the convergence of data, content and operation; convergence for exclusive news and real-time news. And by means of Rich Gordon and Larry Dailey's convergence theories, the paper tests the Journal's convergence comprehensiveness and degree, and summarizes the Journal's convergence trends and weaknesses.Finally, the paper concludes some philosophy enlightenment for Mainland newspapers from the Journal's media convergence strategies, and puts forward their restructuring of convergent product platforms and operating platforms, and constructing new-style mainstream media.