The Wall Street Journal’s digital-only subscriptions have grown 30% since Emma Tucker took over the publication as its top editor, a rate she attributed in a new interview to a strategy of delivering “new, distinctive, useful, compelling, relevant journalism” to the paper’s readers.
The paper’s overall subscription count (including print) has also grown to nearly 4.7 million, a roughly 20% increase from when Tucker became editor-in-chief. Tucker told the U.K.’s Press Gazette that she asked the newsroom to adopt that strategy when she took over in February 2023 after running the Sunday Times in London, a plan that included multiple staff restructurings.
“They did, and the results have been incredibly good,” she said. “I would never rest on my laurels, and there’s still work to be done, but the strategy is working.”
Pillars of that strategy include a focus on short-term and medium-term investigations, such as a visual one into U.S. federal agents’ killing of citizen Alex Pretti during an immigration crackdown in Minnesota or a look at Kristi Noem’s yearlong tenure running the Department of Homeland Security.
The Journal has also revamped its live blog offerings, Tucker said, to make the experience “much more intuitive.” That has driven an “incredible amount of traffic, but also engagement.”
Subscriber engagement has been another focus for Tucker. The newsroom currently displays a data dashboard that showcases subscriber interest, such as the number of unique subscribers, and how much time a subscriber is engaged.
“There’s an absolute direct correlation between how long people spend reading our content or watching our content, or whatever it is they’re doing with our content, and their propensity to churn,” Tucker told the Gazette. “So we used this dashboard as a way of driving that culture change.”
Tucker admitted that a series of layoffs she implemented — including cuts to its Washington, tech and health sections, among others — would rankle people, but she said the cuts were necessary to impose a “huge culture change” and that readers praised the stories the Journal produced afterward.
“No one likes change,” she said. “People hate change. But you have to explain why it’s necessary, and keep explaining it, and keep messaging and then showing the results and trying to create a more positive feedback loop.”
During such changes, Tucker said, the paper has maintained its core focus areas of “business, finance, economics and geopolitics.”
News Corp.’s Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent division, in February reported an 8% revenue increase in its second-quarter earnings report and saw the Journal’s digital subscriptions increase by 13% and its overall subscriptions increase by 11% over the year prior.
