Say It Again a Amntra Really Works Wall Street Journal
Within the Fight for the Future of The Wall Street Journal
A special team led by a high-level manager says Rupert Murdoch'southward paper must evolve to survive. But a rivalry between editor and publisher stands in the manner.
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The Wall Street Journal is a rarity in 21st-century media: a newspaper that makes money. A lot of coin. But at a time when the U.S. population is growing more racially diverse, older white men still make upwardly the largest chunk of its readership, with retirees a close second.
"The No. 1 reason nosotros 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 desperate changes at the paper, which has been part of Rupert Murdoch'due south media empire since 2007. They say The Journal, frequently Mr. Murdoch'due south outset read of the day, must movement away from subjects of interest to established business leaders and widen its scope if information technology wants to succeed in the years to come. The Periodical of the future, they say, must pay more attending to social media trends and cover racial disparities in health intendance, for case, equally aggressively as it pursues corporate mergers.
That argument has yet to convince executives in the elevation ranks of the company.
The Journal got digital publishing right before anyone else. It was i of the few news organizations to accuse readers for online admission starting in 1996, during the days of dial-upward cyberspace. At the fourth dimension, 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 about 1,300-person news staff, made coin, 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 newspaper from innovating further.
The editor leading the news organization equally 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 afterwards, he assembled a strategy team focused on bringing in new digital subscribers. To oversee the group, Mr. Murray hired Louise Story, a journalist whose career included a decade at The New York Times.
She was given a sweeping mandate, marking her equally a potential hereafter leader of the paper. She commands a staff of 150 as chief news strategist and chief product and applied science officer. Her team helped compile a significant audit of the newsroom's practices in an effort to boost subscribers and now plays a key office in the newsroom equally audience experts, advising other editors on internet-search tactics (getting noticed past Google) and social media to assistance increment readership.
As the team was completing a report on its findings concluding summertime, Mr. Murray found himself staring downward a newsroom revolt. Shortly after the killing of George Floyd, staff members created a private Slack channel chosen "Newsroomies," where they discussed how The Periodical, in their view, was behind on major stories of the day, including the social justice move growing in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd's expiry. Participants also complained that The Journal's digital presence was non robust enough, and that its conservative opinion section had published essays that did non see standards applied to the reporting staff. The tensions and challenges are similar to what leaders of other news organizations, including The Times, have heard from their staffs.
In July, Mr. Murray received a draft from Ms. Story's team, a 209-folio blueprint on how The Journal should remake itself called The Content Review. It noted that "in the past five years, we have had half-dozen quarters where nosotros lost more subscribers than we gained," and said addressing its deadening-growing audience called for meaning changes in everything from the paper'due south social media strategy to the subjects it deemed newsworthy.
The report argued that the newspaper 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 besides strongly recommend putting muscle behind efforts to feature more women and people of color in all of our stories."
The Content Review has not been formally shared with the newsroom and its recommendations take not been put into effect, but information technology is influencing how people work: An impasse over the report has led to a divided newsroom, according to interviews with 25 electric current and former staff members. The company, they say, has avoided making the proposed changes because a brewing power struggle between Mr. Murray and the new publisher, Almar Latour, has contributed to a stalemate that threatens the future of The Journal.
Mr. Murray and Mr. Latour, l, represent ii extremes of the model Murdoch employee. Mr. Murray is the tactful editor; Mr. Latour is the brash entrepreneur. The ii rose inside the organization at roughly the same time. When the moment came to replace Gerry Bakery every bit the elevation editor in 2018, both were seen as contenders.
The two men have never gotten along, according to people with cognition of the affair. Or as an executive who knows both well put information technology, "They hate each other." The digital strategy report has just heightened the strain in their human relationship — and, with it, the direction of the crown jewel in the Murdoch news empire.
Their longstanding professional person rivalry comes downwardly to both personality and approach. Mr. Murray is more than deliberative, while Mr. Latour is quick to human activity. But the core of their friction is still a mystery, according to people familiar with them.
Dow Jones, in a statement, disputed that characterization, proverb there was no friction betwixt the editor and publisher. Information technology also cited "record profits and tape subscriptions," which information technology attributed to "the wisdom of its current strategy." Both Mr. Murray and Mr. Latour declined to be interviewed for this commodity.
About a calendar month after the report was submitted, Ms. Story'southward strategy team was concerned that its work might never run into the light of day, three people with cognition of the affair said, and a draft was leaked to one of The Periodical's ain media reporters, Jeffrey Trachtenberg. He filed a detailed commodity on it belatedly last summertime.
But the offset glimpse that outside readers, and virtually of the staff, got of the certificate wasn't in The Periodical. 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 Mr. Murray, people with noesis of the affair said. But he offered an olive branch at the same time. "I'thousand very proud of the work beingness done by the strategy squad beyond the newsroom," he said, co-ordinate to a recording of a meeting obtained by The Times. He added that the report'southward recommendations — "some of which I disagree with" — required fence.
If subsequent contend has led to revisions or an updated strategy, the staff hasn't been told. The Journal'south ain story by Mr. Trachtenberg on The Content Review still has not run.
'A broad cultural fright of change'
Paradigm
The Journal isn't the but 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'southward unusual about the contempo 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 wide cultural fear of change and nosotros overweight the possibility of alienating some readers, compared to our opportunity cost of not changing and growing," it read.
Change in any news arrangement is hard. When Mr. 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 newspaper has retrenched. Now information technology's more of a chimera; office punchy Murdoch, part erstwhile-school Journal.
News Corp, the parent company of Dow Jones, the publisher of The Periodical, 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 study, noting that its site has never attracted more than than 50 one thousand thousand readers for more than a few months.
Dow Jones disputed that figure, saying that the site averaged about 55 million, with a peak of 79 million final March. (The Journal temporarily gave readers complimentary admission to its coverage of the coronavirus pandemic when information technology hit the United States more than a yr ago.)
Earnings filings show The Journal had 2.46 1000000 digital-just subscribers at the terminate of 2020, including 106,000 who came aboard in the year's final quarter.
Early last year, as Ms. Story's team was months away from making its recommendations, Mr. Murray was sanguine that its eventual study would be well received by Will Lewis, who was then the Dow Jones chief executive and The Journal'south publisher, according to several people who worked in the newsroom. But last bound Mr. Lewis suddenly stepped down. He was replaced in both jobs by Mr. Latour, who had won praise within the company for his digital know-how as the publisher of Dow Jones's Barron's Group.
Mr. Murray was not happy to acquire of Mr. Latour's date, according to five people with knowledge of the matter. That's when his attitude toward the strategy squad's efforts changed, the people said.
They added that Mr. Murray was concerned that the group's study, coupled with the staff unrest, would be taken as an indictment of his leadership, and that Mr. Latour might use its findings against him. The document chosen out Mr. Murray in i instance in which it observed that the traffic goals accept "non been articulated well enough in the newsroom," and added, "Unless Matt is abandoning that goal, it needs to exist announced and explained robustly."
Dow Jones disputed that label of Mr. Murray's concern and said that he and Mr. Latour had gotten along and discussed the team'due south work.
Mr. Latour had his own idea of how to goose The Journal'south readership, one built on more mutual traffic tactics that he had employed at the sister titles Barron'southward and MarketWatch. A few people on the business side and some top editors who had seen the assay by Ms. Story'due south team dismissed it as a "woke" strategy, given its emphasis on appealing to underrepresented readers, the people said.
In a statement, Ms. Story said she was proud of her team's work and their collaborative efforts beyond the newsroom, which "has led to dandy results."
Leadership tensions stymie progress
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News Corp looks like about aging media businesses: It's shrinking. It recorded a $1.1 billion loss last year, and news revenues, with the exception of Dow Jones, go on to fall. Dow Jones operates The Periodical and several other titles such as Barron's and MarketWatch, only not News Corp's Australian and British newspapers, which oasis't performed besides. (The visitor besides owns a real estate listings concern, TV stations in Australia and the volume publisher HarperCollins.) News Corp recently hired the consulting firm Deloitte to work on a project to consolidate its many divisions, according to 3 people with direct knowledge of the thing. That would mean cost cuts and could atomic number 82 to the loss of a significant number of jobs, the people said.
The Periodical's ambitious subscriber target is very much role of News Corp's mission to stem the bleeding and detect new areas of growth. Simply its editor and publisher, opposite in many means, appear to have arrived at nearly reverse conclusions about the best way forward.
Mr. Latour, who grew upwards in the small village of Welten, the Netherlands, was known to have clocked more Page 1 stories than nearly anyone else at the paper when he covered the European telecommunication industry. A graduate of 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 Mr. Murdoch.
Mr. Murray, who grew up in Bethesda, Md., is laid-dorsum, amiable and sometimes awkward, colleagues said. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Northwestern, is fascinated by the amusement manufacture and is a Talking Heads fan.
Their strained relationship has gotten in the way of progress, people familiar with the affair say. In a mid-Nov meeting, people saw that firsthand when a disagreement flared up between Mr. Murray and Mr. Latour and one of his lieutenants, Dan Shar, two people with knowledge of the coming together said.
Mr. Shar described his strategy for increasing the number of monthly readers, a programme that differed significantly from the 1 laid out by Ms. Story's squad. At one point, the ii people said, an exasperated Mr. Murray interjected: "But I'k the editor." Mr. Shar laughed. Mr. Latour kept a straight face.
A spokesman for Dow Jones said in a statement that meeting participants did non recall that exchange.
The tertiary grapheme in the ongoing Journal drama is Ms. Story. She has tried to carefully nudge both Mr. Latour and Mr. Murray toward her vision, people effectually her say.
In her decade at The Times, Ms. Story covered the 2008 financial meltdown and was role of the 12-person grouping backside the Innovation Written report, a 2014 manifesto that laid out the strategy that has helped The Times to thrive and the main reason Mr. Murray hired her to run The Journal'south audit.
Ms. Story has recently been in discussions nearly an editor in primary role at both Reuters and The Washington Post, according to ii people with noesis of the matter. Ms. Story declined to comment.
What is The Wall Street Journal?
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Ane of the key problems outlined in The Content Review was the need to retain younger readers. For years, The Journal attracted higher students by offer them a reduced price; simply one time those offers expired, they quit the publication at a higher rate — over 70 percent — than any other group, the report said.
To aid solve that event, Ms. 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 Ms. Story's team in summer 2019 while in loftier school, according to two people familiar with the matter.
"Nosotros demand to movement beyond perceptions and cover bodily data about younger audiences, and that is what WSJ Noted will be providing," the study read. This included "tailoring content" for younger readers; last yr, a staff of 10 reporters, editors and designers were hired to start working on features about inequality in teaching, student debt and related topics.
The project ran into trouble in one case Mr. Murray saw the copy, according to four people with noesis of the matter. He line-edited stories himself, rare for a top Periodical 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. Mr. Murray objected to terms such as "trans-phobia," which was not in the newspaper's manner guide, referring to them as "jargon-y woke-isms," they said. Dow Jones said that Mr. Murray and Ms. Story decided not to publish that article because other outlets had covered the topic.
Noted switched gears. Based partly on a proffer from Mr. Latour, it focused entirely on practical pieces, such as "how to update your résumé" or "how to approach a job interview." 2 Noted editors left in the last week of March, and now in that location are only 4 people on its staff.
One goal put forth by The Content Review seemed more than accessible to many inside the paper than conjuring millions of new subscribers overnight: a greater effort to appeal to readers of colour. In a meeting betwixt the strategy team and high-level editors, Ms. Story spoke almost trying to track the racial variety of people quoted in Journal coverage. Most of those gathered for the discussion were white.
Anybody at the meeting said they agreed that The Periodical should include more than diverse voices. But how? Should they survey subjects about their background? A senior editor expressed concern nigh such a tack, according to ii people who were briefed on the event, saying he was worried the newspaper might be sued if it came out that its reporters were passing over white people to quote Black people. (The company disputes the characterization of the meeting.)
Such comments illustrate how difficult it volition be rewiring the staff to more mod methods of news gathering.
In a Feb. 22 memo to the staff, Mr. Murray endorsed including a wider diversity of people in The Periodical's coverage, pledging to "properly capture the multifariousness of our society and speak to every bit wide an audition equally possible."
Mr. Latour has also been talking about the need for change. In a serial of companywide meetings that started last summer, he emphasized the importance of The Journal'southward digital transformation, but repeated a phrase that many took to mean he wanted a connected focus on concern leaders and Wall Street elites. "Nosotros need to be digging into the brand," he said, according to several staff members.
Mr. Latour never asked for a re-create of The Content Review, according to two people familiar with the matter. It'due south still unclear if he's read it.
If he has, he would know that i primal bulletin contradicts the very approach he'southward favoring: "We can't remember we've got a comfy base of operations of digital subscribers who will exist satisfied if we but go along doing what we're doing."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/business/media/wall-street-journal-murdoch.html
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