Lamenting the departure of famed Wall Street Journal news editor Alix Freedman, who announced this week she is going to work for Reuters, CJR's Dean Starkman offers up a stark assessment of the once-great newspaper, and what Rupert Murdoch has done to the daily since he purchased it in 2007:

Established professionals have defected, lately in droves. Dodgy political tampering began showing up in the news pages. Stories were shortened and productivity demands increased, part of the general hamsterization of the news media, a concept the FCC picked up on in its big study in June. The number of Page One “leders,” the in-depth, long-form stories that were the paper's hallmark, was halved, while the elite Page One operation was itself deconstructed. Generally speaking, speed and brevity are in, depth and narrative, out.

This is to say nothing of the reputational blows it has suffered as part of the News Corp. empire.

Indeed, a recent low point came in the wake of News Corp.'s British hacking scandal and how for nearly a week the Journal refused to report on the fact that its publisher, Les Hinton, was a central player in the hacking scandal. Making matters worse, the Journal published an angry and ill-advised editorial that backed both Hinton and Murdoch, as well as lashed out wildly at the CEO's critics.

But just in terms of being an elite news gathering organization, Starkman suggests that under Murdoch's leadership the Journal, with defections like Freedman's, is now “fast approaching” its “point of no return.”