A special team led by a high-level manager says Rupert Murdoch's paper must evolve to survive. But a rivalry between editor and publisher stands in the way.
The Wall Street Journal is a rarity in 21st-century media: a newspaper that makes money. A lot of money. But at a time when the US population is growing more racially diverse, older white men still make up the largest chunk of its readership, with retirees a close second.
"The No. 1 reason we lose subscribers is they die," goes a joke shared by some Journal editors.
Now a special innovation team and a group of nearly 300 newsroom employees are pushing for drastic changes at the paper, which has been part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire since 2007. They say The Journal, often Murdoch's first read of the day, must move away from subjects of interest to established business leaders and widen its scope if it wants to succeed in the years to come. The Journal of the future, they say, must pay more attention to social media trends and cover racial disparities in health care, for example, as aggressively as it pursues corporate mergers.
That argument has yet to convince executives in the top ranks of the company.
The Journal got digital publishing right before anyone else. It was one of the few news organisations to charge readers for online access starting in 1996, during the days of dial-up internet. At the time, most other publications, including The New York Times, bought into the mantra that "information wants to be free" and ended up paying dearly for what turned out to be a misguided business strategy.
As thousands of papers across the country folded, The Journal, with its nearly 1,300-person news staff, made money, thanks to its prescient digital strategy. While that inoculated The Journal against the ravages wrought by an array of unlikely newcomers, from Craigslist to Facebook, it also kept the paper from innovating further.
The editor leading the news organisation as it figures out how to attract new readers without alienating loyal subscribers is Matt Murray, 54, who got the top job in 2018. He has worked at The Journal for two decades, and his promotion was welcomed by many in the newsroom. Soon after, he assembled a strategy team focused on bringing in new digital subscribers. To oversee the group, Murray hired Louise Story, a journalist whose career included a decade at The New York Times.
She was given a sweeping mandate, marking her as a potential future leader of the paper. She commands a staff of 150 as chief news strategist and chief product and technology officer. Her team helped compile a significant audit of the newsroom's practices in an effort to boost subscribers and now plays a key role in the newsroom as audience experts, advising other editors on internet-search tactics (getting noticed by Google) and social media to help increase readership.
As the team was completing a report on its findings last summer, Murray found himself staring down a newsroom revolt. Soon after the killing of George Floyd, staff members created a private Slack channel called "Newsroomies," where they discussed how The Journal, in their view, was behind on major stories of the day, including the social justice movement growing in the aftermath of Floyd's death. Participants also complained that The Journal's digital presence was not robust enough and that its conservative opinion department had published essays that did not meet standards applied to the reporting staff. The tensions and challenges are similar to what leaders of other news organisations, including The Times, have heard from their staffs.
In July, Murray received a draft from Story's team, a 209-page blueprint on how The Journal should remake itself called The Content Review. It noted that "in the past five years, we have had six quarters where we lost more subscribers than we gained" and said addressing its slow-growing audience called for significant changes in everything from the paper's social media strategy to the subjects it deemed newsworthy.
The report argued that the paper should attract new readers — specifically, women, people of colour and younger professionals — by focusing more on topics such as climate change and income inequality. Among its suggestions: "We also strongly recommend putting muscle behind efforts to feature more women and people of colour in all of our stories."
The Content Review has not been formally shared with the newsroom and its recommendations have not been put into effect, but it is influencing how people work: An impasse over the report has led to a divided newsroom, according to interviews with 25 current and former staff members. The company, they say, has avoided making the proposed changes because a brewing power struggle between Murray and the new publisher, Almar Latour, has contributed to a stalemate that threatens the future of The Journal.
Murray and Latour, 50, represent two extremes of the model Murdoch employee. Murray is the tactful editor; Latour is the brash entrepreneur. The two rose within the organisation at roughly the same time. When the moment came to replace Gerry Baker as the top editor in 2018, both were seen as contenders.
The two men have never gotten along, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Or as an executive who knows both well put it, "They hate each other." The digital strategy report has only heightened the strain in their relationship — and, with it, the direction of the crown jewel in the Murdoch news empire.
Their long-standing professional rivalry comes down to both personality and approach. Murray is more deliberative, while Latour is quick to act. But the core of their friction is still a mystery, according to people familiar with them.
Dow Jones, in a statement, disputed that characterisation, saying there was no friction between the editor and publisher. It also cited "record profits and record subscriptions," which it attributed to "the wisdom of its current strategy."
Both Murray and Latour declined to be interviewed for this article.
About a month after the report was submitted, Story's strategy team was concerned that its work might never see the light of day, three people with knowledge of the matter said, and a draft was leaked to one of The Journal's own media reporters, Jeffrey Trachtenberg. He filed a detailed article on it late last summer.
But the first glimpse that outside readers, and most of the staff, got of the document wasn't in The Journal. In October, a pared-down version of The Content Review was leaked to BuzzFeed News, which included a link to the document as a sideways scan. (Staffers, eager to read the report, had to turn their heads 90 degrees.)
The leak angered Murray, people with knowledge of the matter said. But he offered an olive branch at the same time. "I'm very proud of the work being done by the strategy team across the newsroom," he said, according to a recording of a meeting obtained by The Times. He added that the report's recommendations — "some of which I disagree with" — required debate.
If subsequent debate has led to revisions or an updated strategy, the staff hasn't been told. The Journal's own story by Trachtenberg on The Content Review still has not run.
'A broad cultural fear of change'
The Journal isn't the only media organisation whose leaders have been challenged by its employees. Editors at The Times, the Los Angeles Times and Condé Nast have faced tough questions from staffers on how they have handled race coverage or issues of bias or problematic editorials.
What's unusual about the recent events at The Journal is the public nature of the grievances. The Times, by contrast, is known for how its internal spats become public. At The Journal, workplace gripes tend to stay within the family. Mostly. (None of the people interviewed for this article work at The Times, which has recruited a sizable number of Journal employees.)
The Content Review didn't pull any punches. "We have a broad cultural fear of change and we overweight the possibility of alienating some readers, compared to our opportunity cost of not changing and growing," it read.
Change in any news organisation is hard. When Murdoch bought the paper in 2007, the newsroom was on tenterhooks, worried he would destroy its culture. That didn't happen. Instead, he expanded its coverage to compete more directly with The Times. But over time, the paper has retrenched. Now it's more of a chimera; part punchy Murdoch, part old-school Journal.
News Corp., the parent company of Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, has put pressure on the paper to double the number of subscribers. But to meet that goal, it must "reach a sustained 100 million monthly unique visitors" by June 2024, according to the report, noting that its site has never attracted more than 50 million readers in a given month.
Dow Jones disputed that figure, saying that the site averaged about 55 million, with a peak of 79 million last March. (The Journal temporarily gave readers free access to its coverage of the coronavirus pandemic when it hit the United States more than a year ago.)
Earnings filings show The Journal had 2.46 million digital-only subscribers at the end of 2020, including 106,000 who came aboard in the year's final quarter.
Early last year, as Story's team was months away from making its recommendations, Murray was sanguine that its eventual report would be well received by Will Lewis, who was then the Dow Jones chief executive and The Journal's publisher, according to several people who worked in the newsroom. But last spring Lewis suddenly stepped down. He was replaced in both jobs by Latour, who had won praise within the company for his digital know-how as the publisher of Dow Jones' Barron's Group.
Murray was not happy to learn of Latour's appointment, according to five people with knowledge of the matter. That's when his attitude toward the strategy team's efforts changed, the people said.
They added that Murray was concerned that the group's report, coupled with the staff unrest, would be taken as an indictment of his leadership, and that Latour might use its findings against him. The document called out Murray in one instance in which it observed that the traffic goals have "not been articulated well enough in the newsroom" and added, "Unless Matt is abandoning that goal, it needs to be announced and explained robustly."
Dow Jones disputed that characterisation of Murray's concern and said that he and Latour had gotten along and discussed the team's work.
Latour had his own idea of how to goose The Journal's readership, one built on more common traffic tactics that he had employed at the sister titles Barron's and MarketWatch. A few people on the business side and some top editors who had seen the analysis by Story's team dismissed it as a "woke" strategy, given its emphasis on appealing to underrepresented readers, the people said.
In a statement, Story said she was proud of her team's work and their collaborative efforts across the newsroom, which "has led to great results."
Leadership tensions stymie progress
News Corp. looks like most ageing media businesses: It's shrinking. It recorded a US$1.1 billion loss last year, and news revenues, with the exception of Dow Jones, continue to fall. Dow Jones operates The Journal and several other titles such as Barron's and MarketWatch, but not News Corp.'s Australian and British newspapers, which haven't performed as well. (The company also owns a real estate listings business, TV stations in Australia and book publisher HarperCollins.) News Corp. recently hired the consulting firm Deloitte to work on a project to consolidate its many divisions, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. That would mean cost cuts and could lead to the loss of a significant number of jobs, the people said.
The Journal's ambitious subscriber target is very much part of News Corp.'s mission to stem the bleeding and find new areas of growth. But its editor and publisher, opposite in many ways, appear to have arrived at nearly opposite conclusions about the best way forward.
Latour, who grew up in the small village of Welten, Holland, was known to have clocked more Page 1 stories than almost anyone else at the paper when he covered the European telecommunications industry. A graduate of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, he started his journalism career as an intern at The Washington Times and exhibited the kind of scrappy drive prized by Murdoch.
Murray, who grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, is laid-back, amiable and sometimes awkward, colleagues said. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Northwestern, is fascinated by the entertainment industry and is a Talking Heads fan.
Their strained relationship has gotten in the way of progress, people familiar with the matter say. In a mid-November meeting, people saw that firsthand when a disagreement flared up between Murray and Latour and one of his lieutenants, Dan Shar, two people with knowledge of the meeting said.
Shar described his strategy for increasing the number of monthly readers, a plan that differed significantly from the one laid out by Story's team. At one point, the two people said, an exasperated Murray interjected: "But I'm the editor." Shar laughed. Latour kept a straight face.
A spokesman for Dow Jones said in a statement that meeting participants did not recall that exchange.
The third character in the ongoing Journal drama is Story. She has tried to carefully nudge both Latour and Murray toward her vision, people around her say.
In her decade at The Times, Story covered the 2008 financial meltdown and was part of the 12-person group behind the Innovation Report, a 2014 manifesto that laid out the strategy that has helped The Times to thrive and the principal reason Murray hired her to run The Journal's audit.
Story has recently been in discussions about an editor-in-chief role at both Reuters and The Washington Post, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Story declined to comment.
What is The Wall Street Journal?
One of the key issues outlined in The Content Review was the need to retain younger readers. For years, The Journal attracted college students by offering them a reduced price; but once those offers expired, they quit the publication at a higher rate — over 70 per cent — than any other group, the report said.
To help solve that issue, Story's team launched Noted, a monthly digital magazine designed to appeal to readers under 35.
Noted was also partly the brainchild of Grace Murdoch, one of Rupert Murdoch's daughters, who had interned with Story's team in summer 2019 while in high school, according to two people familiar with the matter.
"We need to move beyond perceptions and embrace actual data about younger audiences, and that is what WSJ Noted will be providing," the report read. This included "tailoring content" for younger readers; last year, 10 reporters, editors and designers were hired to start working on features about inequality in education, student debt and related topics.
The project ran into trouble once Murray saw the copy, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. He line-edited stories himself, rare for a top Journal editor. An article about a college campus movement to abolish sororities and fraternities in an effort to combat racism and homophobia was spiked, according to the people. Murray objected to terms such as "trans-phobia," which was not in the paper's style guide, referring to them as "jargon-y woke-isms," they said. Dow Jones said that Murray and Story decided not to publish that article because other outlets had covered the topic.
Noted switched gears. Based partly on a suggestion from Latour, it focused entirely on practical pieces, such as "how to update your résumé" or "how to approach a job interview." Two Noted editors left in the last week of March, and now there are only four people on its staff.
One goal put forth by The Content Review seemed more attainable to many inside the paper than conjuring millions of new subscribers overnight: a greater effort to appeal to readers of colour. In a meeting between the strategy team and high-level editors, Story spoke about trying to track the racial diversity of people quoted in Journal coverage. Most of those gathered for the discussion were white.
Everyone at the meeting said they agreed that The Journal should include more diverse voices. But how? Should they survey subjects about their background? A senior editor expressed concern about such a tack, according to two people who were briefed on the event, saying he was worried the paper might be sued if it came out that its reporters were passing over white people to quote Black people. (The company disputes the characterisation of the meeting.)
Such comments illustrate how difficult it will be rewiring the staff to more modern methods of news gathering.
In a February 22 memo to the staff, Murray endorsed including a wider variety of people in The Journal's coverage, pledging to "properly capture the diversity of our society and speak to as wide an audience as possible."
Latour has also been talking about the need for change. In a series of companywide meetings that started last summer, he emphasised the importance of The Journal's digital transformation, but repeated a phrase that many took to mean he wanted a continued focus on business leaders and Wall Street elites. "We need to be digging into the brand," he said, according to several staff members.
Latour never asked for a copy of The Content Review, according to two people familiar with the matter. It's still unclear if he's read it.
If he has, he would know that one key message contradicts the very approach he's favouring: "We can't think we've got a comfy base of digital subscribers who will be satisfied if we just keep doing what we're doing."
Written by: Edmund Lee
Photographs by: Devin Oktar Yalkin and Sasha Maslov
© 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES
