Black and White and Red (Blue, green, yellow, orange and turquoise) all over...

This week, on AdAge, I stumbled onto a story about a new approach being taken by the once aesthetically dreary Wall Street Journal. Due to a drop in advertising revenue, the publication has decided to add color. The undertaking was no easy -- or cheap -- feat. Consider this quote from L. Gordon Crovitz regarding the transition:

"We project rapid growth in color demand in excess of current Journal capabilities," said L. Gordon Crovitz, exec VP, Dow Jones & Co., and publisher, The Wall Street Journal. The $30 million project will boost the color pages available to advertisers by 17% to 168 pages a week.

But what of the Journal's traditional content-heavy style of news delivery? Was the mere need to amp up ad revunue all it took to ditch one of the main traits of this paper? I know this is one thing I always recognized (and respected) about the paper. The Journal always seemed to be brimming from margin to margin with newsworthy content. Will an onslaught of housing ads and used car flyers make this paper blend in with all the others on the market?