What the WSJ might experience with a new editor in chief

Joe Pompeo of Vanity Fair takes a look at the potential change in editor in chief at The Wall Street Journal, where Matt Murray has been running the ship since 2018 but where Emma Tucker of The Sunday Times is rumored as a replacement.

Pompeo writes, “Journal folks are no doubt on edge about what a potential shake-up would mean for the paper, and they’re trying to get a read on the woman who may or may not be their new boss. As far as I’ve heard, Tucker is ‘well thought of,’ as one plugged-in British journalist put it, and ‘people like working for her. She is widely regarded as having made The Sunday Times better after some rather patchy years.’ She’s also said to be ‘more liberal’ than Baker or Thomson, for whatever that’s worth, as well as keenly attuned to digital, which she has said was one of her focuses as deputy editor of The Times. ‘The challenge for us, as it is for so many legacy publishers,’ Tucker said in an interview for the Media Masters podcast in 2018, when she was still in that role, ‘is getting the balance right between print and digital. We can’t afford to neglect our print product, because so many people still read the Times in print. But equally, we cannot allow old print practices to hold us back digitally. So it’s a constant nudging forward on the digital front.’

“In the same interview, Tucker emphasized the importance of having ‘a range of voices’ reflected in her publication. ‘We’re neither coming at you from the left, nor are we coming at you from the right, we’re trying to offer you both sides of the argument,’ she said, wisely demurring when the host went on to suggest that Trump is ‘a lunatic that will one day kill us all, in my view.'”

Read more here.