Don Graham of the Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. of the Times would all break out their checkbooks if the Journal were put up for sale.   (Photo: From left: Courtesy of the Washington Post; Jennifer Graylock/AP; Courtesy of The New York Times Company)

Most Dow Jones executives pitch “Weekend Edition” with evangelical fervor. This isn’t a mode that comes naturally to Steiger. Of course, he can tick off plenty of journalistic reasons for the paper to get into the Saturday market. Hot scoops harvested on Friday might not stay ripe until Monday, and the Friday markets often provide dramatic narratives. But Steiger describes Saturday with a slight defensive twinge. “It’s not that the ad sales had to drag us to the weekend; as journalists, we’ve wanted to be there for a while,” he says.

That’s technically true. In the eighties, Steiger’s predecessor, Norman Pearlstine, had toyed with the idea of a weekend paper. But the revived interest in the Saturday edition clearly originated outside the newsroom. More specifically, it can be traced back to COO Richard Zannino. Before editors sat down to kick around ideas for “Weekend Edition” (internal code name: Project Propel), Zannino supplied them with a sheaf of research compiled from focus groups and reader studies. Though the Friday weekend section is filled with real-estate ads, it still has failed to attract the most lucrative department-store and consumer-electronics accounts. And the “Personal Journal” section has even less luck with these groups. “One of the knocks is that [readers spend time with] the Journal at work or on the way to work, when they aren’t in a consumption frame of mind,” Zannino told me. “Now we’re going to give advertisers the chance to reach our readers at home.”

Despite all the preassembled research, Project Propel didn’t. For starters, the company assigned veteran editor Larry Ingrassia to devise a prototype, but also installed deputy managing editors Joanne Lipman and Steve Adler to supervise him. Both Adler and Lipman aspired to replace Steiger, who faces mandatory retirement when he turns 65 in 2007, and they used brainstorming sessions to score points with him and Karen House, according to a person close to the process. Then the Dow Jones board dragged its feet. Although focus-group tests of Ingrassia’s prototype finished in the fall of 2003, the project sat on a shelf for another year. “They kept asking for more market research,” says one editor. During the long intermission, Ingrassia left to edit the Times’ business section—a loss that badly stung the paper. (When I asked Steiger about the string of recent departures, he told me, “There hasn’t been an increase in the number of people we’ve lost who we haven’t been just as happy to lose.”)

Ingrassia and Lipman rarely agreed on editorial matters. Two years ago, at a regular gathering of bureau chiefs, Ingrassia provocatively asked the group if the paper ran too many specious stories trumpeting new trends. It was a not-so-subtle shot at Lipman’s “Weekend Journal” section, which once notoriously reported on the rising number of home chefs using dishwashers to cook fish. Lipman rushed to return the volley, claiming that her sections applied precisely the same standards and editorial rigor as the rest of the paper.

During the development of the first “Weekend Edition” prototype, these competing editorial instincts created a salutary balance. Ingrassia’s higher-brow tendencies tempered Lipman’s commercial ones, especially in the “Pursuits” section of the paper, crammed with lifestyle and entertainment coverage. While Ingrassia accepted the need for fashion and food coverage, he insisted on long magazine-style profiles. The sports page, for instance, contained a piece on the basketball player Mateen Cleaves, describing the life of a benchwarmer. On page one of the main section, there would be a big, non-newsy feature that functioned like a cover story. But after Ingrassia left, Lipman began reworking the prototype. Though she retained the page-one story, reporters jokingly referred to her working version of “Pursuits” as “Lucky,” after Condé Nast’s shopping glossy, because it spilled over with editors’ picks, often presented in charts. Reading “Pursuits,” you might learn which airlines serve gourmet meals or how to procure couture on the cheap.

But even more than stretching the paper editorially, the “Weekend Edition” poses a massive challenge for its business side. The Journal had always shied away from publishing a weekend paper because of the technical challenge of redirecting the half- million copies of the paper delivered to offices. Technological advances have solved part of the problem, but it’s still an expensive proposition, and at least for the early going, the Journal isn’t charging subscribers for the extra day. Executives, including Karen House, have sometimes wondered whether the money wouldn’t be better spent further developing Dow Jones’s Websites or diversifying the company’s portfolio. After all, since every newspaper, including the Journal, is inexorably losing its readership, is it wise to be doing more on paper, especially on Saturday when newspapers don’t usually draw huge audiences? Finally, to score coveted advertisers like department stores, the Journal will need to show that it can garner more female readers than it has in the past.