WSJ hires Story as editor of newsroom strategy

Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray sent out the following announcement on Wednesday:

Dear All:

I am delighted to announce that Louise Story, a highly accomplished reporter and digitally experienced leader, will join The Journal next week in a new, senior role as Editor, Newsroom Strategy.

Louise will be a core member of the senior team, working closely with me and all of you in navigating our strategic future. We have enjoyed a great deal of success in recent years improving our digital products, workflow and mindset, and the results are manifest in the work we produce, the growth of our membership model and the rise of new areas like live journalism and video. But we can be sure the future will be as turbulent as the recent past. Externally, journalism continues to face profound challenges as forces from demography to technology reshape the world and our audience. Internally, we have a host of new opportunities to explore, from international expansion to how we tell stories.

Louise’s focus on innovation and strategy will be a key driver of our journalism. Her team will include Audience & Analytics, the innovation lab, newsletters, editorial ventures and our soon-to-be-hired student editor, and her brief will include a range of initiatives and certainly will evolve over time. Louise also will join our Sunday senior-editor rotation.

Louise brings the right journalistic, innovation and leadership chops for this important role. As an investigative reporter at the New York Times, she drove major projects on illicit money in real estate, the cost of state and local business incentives and the 2008 financial crisis. The real estate project, Towers of Secrecy, spurred the Treasury Department’s FinCen to create a new reporting program for high-end sales. Her work during the financial crisis led to a $1.8 billion settlement related to the derivatives market and broke new ground on Goldman Sachs’s Abacus deals, which became central to that bank’s $550 million settlement.

She also gained notice there as a leader in innovation. She was a co-author of the Times’s 2014 Innovation Report and was a member of the Audience workflow within its 2020 project. She led Live Video for the Times in 2016 and 2017, running all news coverage in that medium on all topics including the 2016 election, Olympics, breaking news, international, fashion, food and opinion, and working with more than 300 reporters and editors to plan segments and develop new skills. She also co-hosted the Times’ TimesCast live video program in 2012.

Louise was the business contributor for three years for “The Takeaway,” a national radio program produced by WNYC. Over the past year, she has executive-produced and written a feature-length documentary about the 1MDB corruption scandal that features her own reporting as well as the reporting of the WSJ’s Tom Wright and Bradley Hope. The film will debut this fall.

A Florida native, Louise earned a bachelor’s and an M.B.A. at Yale and an M.S. at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Manhattan, and her hobbies include running, rock climbing, cycling and seeing theater. Indeed, in her spare time she wrote a documentary-style play this summer that she hopes will show in the city at some point.

In some ways this Journal job brings Louise full circle; she was an intern at Personal Journal in 2004, sitting near Journal veterans like tax reporter Tom Herman. In college, she shared a house with a group that included Charles Forelle. Her longtime colleague Gretchen Morgenson joined our investigative team a year ago.

Louise will report to me, and I couldn’t be more excited to see what she brings to the Journal. Please join me in welcoming her as we map the course ahead.