If you've seen or heard any media in the last couple of months, I imagine that's it's not news that the Wall Street Journal launched a Saturday edition today. Given all the hype and ballyhoo, I'm disappointed to report that my world was more rocked by my favorite neighborhood bar discontinuing its funky Irish brunch than that I won't have new reading material no matter where I eat on Saturday.

Here's why the Journal's Saturday paper is dead on arrival: There are no surprises whatsoever. At least at this point, there's no evidence of a single fresh idea, or even the deft execution of a well-worn chestnut of an idea. It's a focus-grouped, advertiser-friendly confection with nothing that I can't get in hundreds of other venues. What the Journal seems to have fallen victim to is the kind of insular thinking that kills so many entrenched enterprises: It seems to believe that there's value in the information being delivered by the Wall Street Journal, as if that were enough to carry the day. The decided lack of splash here is also another tale of the downside of hype. If you can't live up to it, the backlash isn't going to be pretty.

Here's what I was hoping for. More articles like the Journal's justifiably famous "A-hed" column (that's the one in the middle column on the front page each day, although on the reconfigured weekend front page, it's below the fold in the middle and not that good today either).

In other words, great storytelling to make my Saturday fly by and give me fodder for cocktail party conversation all weekend (as opposed to cocktail party drink recipes from the boring but serviceable drinks columnist). Stuff to share with co-workers around the water cooler on Monday. Stuff that teaches me something besides just separating me from my money. What a friend once described to me as the "a------ theory of journalism," which is that if you're in a group and everyone's talking about some amazing story and you haven't read it, you feel like an a------.

What I got instead was "Pursuits," a a juiced up version of Personal Journal that's basically a cliche of every entertainment or general-interest magazine's front of the book and every "weekend" section of a major-market daily newspaper. Info on new restaurants, check. Shopping tips, check. Books, music, movies, drinks column, check check check and check. And on and on. None of it is awful, mind you. Just stunningly obvious service journalism about the stuff that well-off consumerists are theoretically interested in. It's as if the target audience is the kind of clueless suit who needs a publication to tell him that dress casual shoes--they have rubber soles on the bottom!--are okay to wear with a suit before being able to slip them on with a clear conscience.

Look, it's the Wall Street Journal. There's news worth reading. There are a couple of interesting feature-type stories. But no "weirdness," nothing to make you sit up and take notice.

Now I just feel like an a------ for spending $1.50 this morning and believing for a minute that things could've been different.