It must've been a bitter pill for Jack Shafer to swallow when his editor showed him the headline of his column published Friday: "Is the Journal Getting … Better?" To be sure, that's exactly what Shafer is arguing, pulling a 180 after what seems like endless columns where he railed against Rupert Murdoch from the first whispers of his trying to buy the paper from the Bancroft family to his first days as its new owner. But might the biggest foe to balanced journalism actually have made the Wall Street Journal a better paper through his stewardship?

Writes Shafer

Back in January, I griped about how genocidal tyrant Rupert Murdoch, having just won the pink slip to the Wall Street Journal, was already ruining it. I based my riff on an e-mail observation from my friend Ben Compaine, in which he noted that the Journal had abandoned its tight focus on business and was now larding its pages with mediocre political and international coverage. (See the content analysis from the Project for Excellence in Journalism that proves my point.)

Call it subtraction by addition.

Murdoch's design—stated and restated—was to knock the New York Times off its perch as the first newspaper the elites reach for each morning. Fat chance of that, I thought, as the Murdoch-ized Journal landed on my doorstep week after week.

And then:

And then some time around the beginning of the month, my disposition changed, and the Journal moved to the head of my daily newspaper line—not because of its political and international coverage but because it was swinging hard again in its traditional wheelhouse to produce great enterprise journalism. [...]

On an entirely speculative tangent, maybe Robert Thomson, who added managing editor to his existing publisher title last month, has started to appreciate the newspaper's real strengths. Or maybe it's an accident. Or a trap set by Murdoch to lure unsuspecting readers. Regardless, if the Journal continues on this course, a year's subscription at $99 will continue to be the best deal American newshounds can purchase. (The Journal pushes a bunch of different prices for a subscription. I got my last one for $90, I think, and it included online access. If you discover a cheaper offer, e-mail me and I'll update.)