Anyone who thinks the departure of Alix M. Freedman, the WSJ’s Page One editor, a twenty-seven-year Journal mainstay, and winner of one of the more storied Pulitzers in my old paper’s storied past, is inside-baseball for media types is dead wrong.

It’s a devastating blow to that institution, the great story-telling factory that revolutionized American journalism and became the great popularizer for the middle class of things financial, economic, and corporate.