Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker sent out the following announcement on Wednesday:
By now you will have had a chance to read and digest Will Lewis’s note about the challenges and opportunities we face as we position The Wall Street Journal for robust growth for the long-term.
In the newsroom we have already made great strides towards becoming a truly digital operation. That progress is reflected in the strong growth we have witnessed this year in digital circulation, driven of course by our peerless journalism. And we will make even greater progress in the next few years as we focus increasingly on mobile as the platform for our news. But as Will noted, we operate in a time of rapidly changing market conditions, especially in the world of print advertising. So we must press ahead even more aggressively with digital transformation, to seize the abundant promise of growth, and at the same time take measures to ensure that our unrivaled print newspaper is both as fresh as it can be and is placed on a sustainable footing for the future.
In the next few weeks, we will launch a revised version of the print Journal. The overarching aim remains the same as ever: to produce a paper every day that is the best and most comprehensive for coverage of business, finance, economics, politics and policy, while still providing readers with smart and eclectic coverage of life, arts, culture, entertainment, sports and other topics essential to a busy life well lived. The new product will be a livelier, sharper and more concise newspaper that is an engaging counterpart to our digitally delivered news. It will also present a more coherent organization of our coverage in print and will involve some consolidation of sections of the paper and the teams that produce it. I will have more details on the paper’s print changes shortly.
At the same time, as Will said, we need to examine thoroughly our whole newsroom operation with a view to improving its efficiency. As part of the company-wide WSJ 2020 project announced today, I have asked Matt Murray to lead a full review of our operations in New York and around the world. He will be in touch with editors, bureau chiefs and others over the next couple of months. His aim will be not only to seek to improve the effectiveness of our operations but to identify the opportunities for growth in our news products, especially those for a professional audience. As Will said, these measures will require difficult decisions, with some inevitable significant restructuring and they will, regrettably, mean concomitant cost reductions.
These are days of accelerating change in the newspaper business. None of our competitors is immune from the challenges. But the news organizations that will survive and thrive in this evolving environment are those that operate most efficiently to produce news on all platforms that readers need and demand. I am confident that the changes we will make in the next few months will secure the Journal’s place in the vanguard of the news business.
