A great deal of ink has been given to Rupert Murdoch's now apparently successful bid for Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Part of this is because the news media love to cover ... the news media.

However, we are also talking about one of the best newspapers in the country and, importantly, a place that's always been a dream for aspiring writers in small and midsized newsrooms everywhere.

The New York Times may be the paper of record, but the Journal has always attracted those who see themselves as writers. Its great creativity and willingness to take risks with its page one stories -- particularly those in the center column -- gave heart to hardworking scribes everywhere.

Now, many are worried that Murdoch will impose his personal views on Journal writers and eliminate much of what made the Journal great. Yet, the Washington Post's David Ignatius argues that the downfall of the WSJ began some time ago and had nothing to do with Murdoch.

The Journal of the mid-1980s was a demonstration of the proposition that good journalism and good business go hand in hand. This was the decade of the Wall Street dealmakers, and the Journal had a managing editor (Norman Pearlstine) and reporter/editor (James B. Stewart) who went after them with the intensity of journalistic Gordon Gekkos. It was a tough, canny paper -- whose front page each morning had more voltage even than the fiery editorial page.

That balance began to change in the 1990s, after Pearlstine and his pal John Huey left for Time Inc. The Journal's editorial page increasingly did its own reporting, with equal portions of journalistic hustle and ideological spin, and it often overshadowed the news side. I suspect that helped undermine the franchise. Advertisers, in the end, perhaps weren't enthralled with a newspaper distinguished by vitriolic right-wing attack editorials.

For Journal alumni, the past decade has been like watching a car wreck in slow motion. The people driving the car were our friends, the journalists we respected most. Now an ambulance of sorts, in the person of Rupert Murdoch, has arrived to pick up the bodies.

I worry about this, but not because of any particular love for one publication or its parent company. I worry because as a young journalist some years ago, I read those same Journal stories Ignatius refers to with awe and admiration. I wanted to write like that, and that aspiration pushed me to become better at my craft.

So if WSJ stories have now lost their sizzle, then what will drive good journalists to become great ones in the future? Already, news organizations are laying off and cutting back. Now this? What inspiration will remain?

The answer may just be the medium you are reading now. Maybe the blogosphere will become the writers' choice in the years to come. Maybe it will be some other medium that is today just being born in someone's garage in California.

If so, there are tremendous changes afoot in how and where we get our news. Against that, Murdoch's $5 billion newspaper acquisition won't make much difference at all.

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