I'd heard tell that the staff of The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition is about to celebrate their first-year anniversary at a local pool hall in Manhattan. They even ordered a batch of temporary tattoos sporting the Dow Jones corporate logo. But when I asked Neil Budde, editor of the Interactive Edition, if the online venture is edgier than the rest of Dow Jones, the site's parent company, the answer was a little disappointing. "Well, it's as edgy as you can get in a big corporation," he chuckled.
Dusky Manhattan pool halls aside, the Interactive Edition is, in fact, unapologetically corporate. While a lot of design applicants approach the Interactive Edition with ideas for new Java apps and flashy layouts, the designers actually have to be fairly conservative. "We're not looking for way-out stuff or what's going to look the coolest. The content needs to work on the broadest range of browsers," says Budde.
"Dow Jones first and foremost wants to make sure they get it right," says Budde, who was a journalist before he joined Dow Jones 10 years ago. He was responsible for the day-to-day editorial management of the Electronic Publishing's News/Retrieval service when he lobbied to put the Journal on the Web. When I checked last December, the Web site had 50,000 paid subscribers, most of whom were paying the full US$49/year price. Today, subscribers number 90,000.
WSJ's Interactive Edition is looking for a designer who's experienced in producing clean designs specifically for HTML. This means building templates and page prototypes that present financial data and news elegantly. They're looking for someone who also has experience working in a busy newsroom, with an understanding of how editors work. Let's just say that the salary is nice, the job isn't exactly a creative outlet, but having The Wall Street Journal on your résumé can't hurt.
Editors for the Interactive Edition sit side by side with the editors for the print paper, so the online text keeps close to the ideas in the Journal. The seven current designers inhabit a crammed office space upstairs. The site posts some new content, but a lot of the staff's effort goes into tailoring the print version to online reading.
Because the 24-hour newsroom can be hectic, Budde, who's low-key and easy to talk to, likes to escape by going upstairs to the tiny design office, where the tone is a little more casual. "That's where I go when I'm hungry," Budde says. "They always have cookies or something lying around. I'll just go up there and pretend to ask them something." I like an honest guy like Budde.
