In a grim news industry, The Wall Street Journal is a rare, consistent bright spot: A big, successful, old-school publication that never needed to figure out a subscription strategy because it was always in the business of selling subscriptions. But the Murdoch family, which owns the Journal, still wanted to shake things up at the paper. So in February 2023 it installed Emma Tucker, who previously ran the UK's Sunday Times for the Murdochs, as the Journal's editor-in-chief.
Her mandate: Broaden the paper's appeal and subscriber base. For folks who pay attention to this kind of thing, the results are pretty evident. Headlines are punchier and more clickable, and the paper has made a point of writing stories that break through the noise — like a June 4 story quoting Washington insiders who said " Weeks later, .
Tucker has also restaffed the paper and laid off some staff, which has led to . Readers seem to like the changes, though: In the last year . I talked to Tucker about all of that, along with an update on Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was freed from a Russian jail this summer, in the most recent episode of my podcast.
You can read edited excerpts of our conversation below: It starts with thinking really hard every morning, every day, about our audiences and asking ourselves "What does the audience want from us? What can we give them that is useful that adds value to their lives?" Everything flows from that. So we're doing things to make our audiences engaged, ra.
