Some differences, from someone who knows far more about news and the news industry than they should (and I'm not in the industry):
* Very generally, the Times focuses more on investigative journalism and non-business news; the WSJ's priority is business news. But they both cover plenty in all fields.
* The Times is generally a little more prominent, the leading newspaper (and news source) in the world and the "Newspaper of Record"[1] for the U.S., but I'm not sure how that reputation benefits you, the reader.
* The Times' arts coverage is unquestionably the best and most sophisticated of any newspaper, if that matters to you, from film to theater to music to exhibitions to other 'fine' arts. However, it is somewhat New York-centric (it is the New York Times, after all, and NY is the center of the U.S. and global art world).
* Editorial: Even the best newspapers' standards of accuracy on their editorial pages are far below those of their journalism; they often are happy to print outright lies and propaganda either to push a political issue or because it's influential. IIRC, maybe a decade ago the Times decided they would raise the standards somewhat on their editorial page. Regardless, I find the Times publishes less outright bullsh-t; they have a politically diverse roster of columnists but the unsigned editorials are definitely liberal. The WSJ regularly pushes things like climate denial and other bizarre ideas (that serve the conservative, wealthy busiess elite) such as this one:[2] Personally, I don't read any editorials in any paper - they are so regularly ignorant of or lying about the facts and full of propaganda (that word again) that I never know if I'm becoming more misinformed by reading them.
* Other options: Also, I'd consider the Financial Times, the leading international competitor to the WSJ, which I think is just as good as the other two and provides a more diverse perspective coming from the UK. Certainly there is more overlap in coverage between the NYT and WSJ than between either and the FT - check out their site and you'll see many important stories you'd oterwise miss. The Washington Post also is excellent. I can't think of another source of serious news, in English, in the class of those four.
* IMHO: The WSJ is owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch), the same company that owns Fox News. Their demonstrated willingness to lie and push propaganda at Fox News, as well as openly use it to control the political process, makes me doubt that the same owners would have more integrity at WSJ. Their editorial page confirms my doubts to a degree. I don't trust it, though many others do. I don't completely trust the NY Times either, of course, but much more than their Manhatten neighbor.
I hope that helps.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_of_record - don't believe some Wikipedia editor's attempt to equate the LA Times and Washington Post with the Times. If any challenges its position, it's the WSJ.
I would also add that the NYT simply has the best online newspaper. The site itself is beautiful, and I am continually impressed with their innovation in interactive features and design.
> I would also add that the NYT simply has the best online newspaper. The site itself is beautiful, and I am continually impressed with their innovation in interactive features and design.
Interesting. I would disagree, or at least I think being the "best online newspaper" is sort of like being the best WAP web browser. I think many bloggers do better.
Note that we call it an 'online newspaper' - often you can instantly identify news websites are made by former newspapers as opposed to other news sources, as if the UI of their website should depend on the archaic medium they once used.
What are you thinking of that has both the scope and depth of content of the NYT, and the innovation in design? Or did you just mean one of those two criteria?
They're content is unmatched (except arguably by one of the three I mentioned above), I was just talking about design.
As a user, I don't find the innovations very useful and the design functions poorly. For example:
1) Most of their content is hard to discover; the front page must have 100 links to stories, some old and some new, and much more is buried elsewhere - if I wanted to see every story of interest to me, I'm not sure if or how I could do that starting from the home page. I also read it via RSS and it's a whole different news source, with far more coverage. People reading on the web miss a lot.
2) Updates to news stories: If a story has been updated, how do you know? You have to look around the home page for the words 'updated xx:yy' - not really a great method of notification. And if I click the updated story there is no way find out what's changed without reading the whole story again, looking for things that don't seem familiar.
3) Their inability to integrate multimedia in story-telling: A movie review never says, 'watch the clip below; see how the colors ...' <video> 'also note how the actors ...'. They have images and video, but they are decorations stapled onto the real story in text and not an integral part of it - or even a more dramatic example, the videos with hard news are completely segregated from the text story. They still are a newspaper, stuck in the limitations of the old medium where text was the only realistic option, with a few images added on.
Note that bloggers handle many of these issues efficiently. The NYT is still a newspaper on the web.
