The Verge CEO Nilay Patel interviewed Dow Jones & Co. CEO Almar Latour about various topics on his podcast, including artificial intelligence and The Wall Street Journal’s recent cuts of its technology news staff.
Here is an excerpt:
But it happens that I have you on the day after the news, so I want to start with the news. Just last night, The Wall Street Journal, of which Dow Jones is the publisher, restructured how it covers tech and media. That involved cutting about 10 or 15 editors and reporters. Obviously, I’m very interested in how you structure a newsroom to cover tech. Why make that decision? Why get smaller?
First, this is a newsroom decision, so this is squarely in the terrain of [editor-in-chief] Emma Tucker, who’s a new editor, relatively speaking. She’s in year two, moving into year three. Emma was hired with a remit of helping to increase engagement with our existing readers, to expand our readership, and to maintain and enhance the quality of our coverage. She has set out over the past two years to rethink how she wants to offer news with The Wall Street Journal newsroom.
Her consistent message, and this is one that I subscribe to, is that distinctive journalism is what makes the difference. It’s about knowing the interesting story, the story behind the story, and to have exclusive journalism and insights. That I say as a preface because Emma has been making changes to nearly every part of The Wall Street Journal and continues to do that.
So what happened yesterday was a continuation of that. Generally, when you look at the changes that she’s brought in — I’m not speaking specifically about the San Francisco bureau but tech — it’s been new talent. She has an antenna for what she thinks works there. And one of the areas where that’s been very pronounced in recent months is in Washington, D.C. That has gone through several cycles of changes.
She’s brought in new people, and that has had consequences. The marching orders are slightly different when there is a closer connection to the center of the newsroom, where the decisions about news can be made in the context of a broader story that’s happening around the world, rather than in isolation around a certain topic. So that’s the context for yesterday.
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