WSJ Editor's Resignation
Is Criticized
By Committee

A special committee established to oversee The Wall Street Journal's editorial integrity said its members should have been informed earlier that the newspaper's managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, had been pressured to resign.

The criticism came in a chronology released by the committee Tuesday of the events that led to Mr. Brauchli's surprise resignation April 22. At a meeting that day, "Committee members expressed the view that learning of the Brauchli matter after the fact failed to meet the letter and the spirit of the agreement" that outlines the body's powers, the chronology stated.

The five-member special committee was created as a condition of News Corp.'s agreement to acquire Dow Jones & Co. last year. The body is responsible for safeguarding Dow Jones's editorial independence and integrity.

The committee said it relayed its concerns to officials at News Corp., which in December acquired Dow Jones, publisher of the Journal. The officials pledged to keep the committee "thoroughly informed" during the search for Mr. Brauchli's successor, the committee said.

Mr. Brauchli, a longtime Journal reporter and editor, resigned less than a year after he was named managing editor. He did so about two weeks after a meeting this month with Journal publisher Robert Thomson and Dow Jones Chief Executive Leslie Hinton -- both News Corp. appointees -- at which they suggested it might be better to have their own person running the newspaper, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Brauchli agreed to resign and remain at News Corp. as a consultant.

"It was not our view that I had to report to the committee my voluntary resignation under the terms of the editorial agreement," Mr. Brauchli, 46, said in an interview Tuesday. "I regret that they first learned of my resignation late in the process." A News Corp. spokesman declined comment.

In its chronology, the committee said it "has not been made aware of any issues of editorial independence or integrity either before or since" the April 22 meeting. The committee said it later met "and decided that there was no practical way to 'unresign' Brauchli and start the process over."

"Under the agreement, the committee has the duty and responsibility to approve or disapprove such actions," the statement said, referring to the removal and hiring of the managing editor. "The Committee intends to exercise fully its role in the approval of a successor managing editor and to take the steps necessary to prevent a repeat of the process it has just been through."

The committee's powers are spelled out in a document that Dow Jones filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in August as part of the deal eventually approved by its shareholders.

In an opinion piece published in this newspaper in December, the committee said its "charge is fairly specific ... It 'shall have the rights of approval' over the hiring or removal of three key editors -- the managing editor and the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, and the managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires under its current structure."

It also noted that it has the right to publish its findings and decisions in the Journal and other Dow Jones publications and "also has the right to seek legal enforcement of its decisions."

Under the terms of the agreement, the Journal's managing editor has "authority over all news decisions," including "news coverage, length, placement and accompanying art" of stories. A Dow Jones spokesman said, "There is absolutely no suggestion from the special committee that the integrity of the Journal's reporting or of its reporters has been compromised in any way whatsoever."

In recent months, Mr. Brauchli had pushed Journal editors for stories to be shorter and get to the point more quickly. At times, he portrayed this and other changes as his own initiative; at other times, he said these were instructions from the new owners.

Since the News Corp. takeover, the paper has begun publishing more general-interest and political news, including on the front page, and added more news pages. But Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.'s chairman, was impatient with the pace of change, according to people close to the situation.

Until last week, when Mr. Brauchli resigned from his job, the committee had no indication there were issues between him and News Corp, it said. Mr. Brauchli had not raised any issues when he met with the committee in February at a regularly scheduled meeting. He "assured us that no issues of editorial independence or integrity had arisen in the wake of the News Corp. acquisition," the committee said.

The committee also wasn't told of the meeting between Mr. Brauchli and Messrs. Hinton and Thomson at which he agreed to step down.

"That Marcus agreed to that thing without coming to us put us in a very difficult spot," Thomas J. Bray, the committee's chairman, said in an interview. He also said, "The agreement says nothing about our role in a resignation."

After he stepped down, Mr. Brauchli said in a note to the staff, "Now that the ownership transition has taken place, I have come to believe the new owners should have a managing editor of their choosing." He hired Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, whose clients include former President Bill Clinton, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, to negotiate a settlement on his behalf.

The committee's authority and mandate were the result of lengthy negotiations between executives of Dow Jones, News Corp. and members of the Bancroft family, which controlled Dow Jones. Mr. Brauchli himself was involved in writing the editorial agreement that outlined the committee's powers, and on several occasions last year told editors in the Journal's newsroom that he had personally overseen certain parts of the agreement that would protect the newsroom's independence.

The idea of creating a committee to protect the newspaper's integrity came from Mr. Murdoch. In trying to convince the Bancroft family to sell Dow Jones, he wrote a letter to them last May, proposing a board "exactly along the lines of" one he established in London after purchasing the Times and Sunday Times in 1981.

The London committee was to have approval over the hiring and firing of the top editors, according to the newspapers' articles of association. But a year after buying the paper, Mr. Murdoch forced out the Times's editor, Harold Evans, igniting a controversy within media circles.

In creating the Dow Jones committee, whose members each earn $100,000 a year, people involved in the discussions on the newspaper's side focused on ensuring the body's independence and granting it the power to investigate any allegations of damage to the paper's editorial integrity by Mr. Murdoch or News Corp. Although the committee also was given "rights of approval" of the "appointment and removal" of the three top editors, the negotiators believed such powers would be difficult to enforce, according to people familiar with the matter.

"The agreement is aimed at editorial independence and integrity; in other words, good clean journalism," says Mr. Bray. "That's the point of the agreement."

Some members of the Bancroft family expressed little surprise that the committee was unable to prevent Mr. Brauchli's resignation. "I expected this paper to be transformed in the way Mr. Murdoch wants it to be, and it will be, regardless of all the window dressing," said Christopher Bancroft, who opposed the News Corp. deal.

Write to Steve Stecklow at steve.stecklow@wsj.com