WSJ editor Emma Tucker on how title grew digital subs by a third to 4.3m

The Wall Street Journal’s recent run of subscriptions growth is not down to an accident or luck, editor-in-chief Emma Tucker has made clear.

Digital-only subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal have grown by 30% to 4.29 million since the start of 2023, when Tucker joined as editor from fellow News Corp title The Sunday Times.

Overall subscriptions (including print) have increased by 20% to 4.68 million.

Dow Jones, of which The Wall Street Journal is a key part, expects to reach $1bn profit within five years (it had EBITDA profit of $588m in the year ending 30 June 2025). Dow Jones is the fastest-growing segment within News Corp.

Tucker set out a strategy to the newsroom when she arrived in New York three years ago, based around giving audiences the “new, distinctive, useful, compelling, relevant journalism” they needed.

“I asked the newsroom to get behind that strategy,” she told Press Gazette. “I also made structural changes to the newsroom to enable it to get behind that strategy. They did, and the results have been incredibly good.

“I would never rest on my laurels, and there’s still work to be done, but the strategy is working.

“It just goes to show you when a newsroom as, frankly, brilliant as The Wall Street Journal’s gets collectively behind a very clear strategy, you get results.”

At a recent company town hall meeting, Tucker told staff: “This is not an accident. It’s not luck or because, oh, it was the Journal’s turn. We are in a good place because we have put our minds collectively to delivering the kind of journalism that we know audiences want.”

WSJ strategy behind subscriptions growth

Changes have included reshaping the investigations team so it could focus more on quicker investigations with news hooks.

Tucker said “that didn’t mean we were abandoning doing investigations that require time and effort” but that previously the team was not set up to jump on to short and medium-term investigations.

Examples of this have included a visual investigation of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents amid immigration raids in Minnesota in January and reporting on what was going on behind the scenes at the Department of Homeland Security led by Kristi Noem.

Tucker said: “She was the first head to roll in Trump Two and we set that reporting in motion.”

Tucker said she has broken down barriers in the newsroom to ensure its “expertise is best leveraged”.

Live blogs have been revamped both in terms of making the product experience “much more intuitive” and in the news updates themselves.

“We think really hard about how we update it so we’re there, we’re timely, but we’re trying to give real added value with the blog posts that we do. They have been driving an incredible amount of traffic, but also engagement,” Tucker said.

The WSJ is doing more “re-versioning” of well-read stories into other formats such as video, reader Q&As or “takeaways” (bite-sized explanations of WSJ reporting).

“We’re just being much more creative about the ways in which we reach our audiences, and that’s because if you’re not getting sent the traffic [from platforms like Google], you have to find different ways of building connections with your readers,” Tucker said.

Last year the WSJ won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Elon Musk and was a finalist for its investigation into Medicare insurance payments and reporting on Russian spy agencies. In 2023 the newsroom won a Pulitzer for investigating financial conflicts of interest among officials at 50 federal agencies.

Despite the changes Tucker said the WSJ has kept “business, finance, economics and geopolitics” at its core. “It’s a huge advantage for us to have that, because it defines us, and it gives us a sort of niche, if you like: it’s a big niche, but it is a niche, and that plays very well in digital.”

She added that they are careful not to neglect other parts of people’s lives such as personal finance, careers, buying property, parenting, fitness and health, describing these as “things that are never going to be our core but there is a Wall Street Journal way of addressing these issues”.

‘In order to really deliver great journalism, you have to make some tough decisions’

The changes meant the newsroom went through several rounds of layoffs and restructuring including:

• February 2024: Sixteen reporters and one columnist let go in a shake-up of Washington DC coverage
• April 2024: Around 11 layoffs on the social media and video desks
• May 2024: At least eight layoffs and “many” US news reporters moved into other teams in the newsroom as US news ceased to be a standalone coverage area and East Coast, mid-US and West Coast regional bureaux closed
• January 2025: A reduction in the number of Life and Work bureau chiefs as that department folded into Business, Finance and Economics
• October 2025: Around a dozen reporters and editors laid off amid a restructure of the health, science and education teams
• January 2026: Some departures amid “strategic restructure” of features and weekend teams to move from print-centric to “nimble, topic-driven structure”.

Tucker acknowledged that “huge culture change” was needed to carry this out and said celebrating the team’s wins had helped.

“We started getting plaudits for the kind of stories we were doing quite soon after we started making changes,” she said, adding this meant “people understand that in order to really deliver great journalism, you have to make some tough decisions. You don’t have one without the other.

“No one likes change. 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.”

Using the right data was also “critical” to the culture change, Tucker said, in a “very targeted way that was easy for the newsroom to understand, but which enabled the newsroom to orient around key metrics”.

The data dashboard now on display to the newsroom emphasises two metrics: subscriber interest (the number of subscriber uniques) and subscriber engaged time.

“If subscribers are interested and they’re sticking around, then we’re doing something right,” Tucker said.

“And 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. So we used this dashboard as a way of driving that culture change.”

The dashboard is weighted based on how long a story was up, where it was on the website, what time we published it and what type of story it was so it is not always dominated by stories at the top of the homepage, for example.

Tucker added that the data brought its own challenges because “any dashboard gets misinterpreted, and I’ve had to emphasise and re-emphasise that this dashboard is not a name and shame dashboard. It’s to help us understand our readers’ behaviour.”

The dashboard includes non-subscriber uniques with the goal of helping these people “build a habit that they will feel they need.

“We want to try and create a sense of FOMO [fear of missing out]. If you haven’t checked your Wall Street Journal, you’re missing out on something.”

The WSJ told Press Gazette subscriber visits are up 10% year on year while time spent per subscriber is up 6%.

WSJ doing more ‘slicing and dicing’

Tucker accepted that continuing the run of growth will become more of a challenge: “All the easy gains have been got so now growing our audience is harder than it was.”

But she said the newsbrand tracks its reader cohorts closely and has pinpointed the biggest potential growth areas.

The “pre-suites” are one of the “fastest-growing and most-engaged cohorts”, Tucker said. They are in their 40s, mostly men, established in their careers but still aspirational – and now make up 22% of individual WSJ subscriptions.

“Now that we’ve established the reader first, audience first strategy, as we embark onto the next sort of three years, we’re thinking, okay, how do we diversify our offer?” Tucker said.

Tucker added that they “may come to us in the morning for one thing, but if they come back to us later, they’re looking for something else. Are we making sure we’re offering them that something else at the right points of the day?”

The WSJ is not specifically targeting new audiences like women or young people “because we do stories when we think they’re really important” although female readership and international page views are both up.

Tucker said what they do think about is: “If we’re going to tell this story, what’s the best way to tell it for a particular audience?…

“There are some people who are never going to read 2,500 words on a story, but they’re interested in the story. They’ll come back for a takeaways version of that story, or a vertical video with a journalist talking about that story, or some other way that we might turn this into something. So we’ve got all this great content, but sometimes you have to slice it and dice it for different audiences. We’re doing more of that.”

Tucker said this also included a new on-platform video strategy (moving away from a previous emphasis on social media), personality-led newsletters, and both large and small events.

Come back to Press Gazette next week for more on the WSJ video strategy with head of video Maral Usefi.

Flagship events include The Future of Everything in New York, roundtable discussions-based CEO Council Summit (in London and San Francisco in 2026) and Tech Live (in California and Qatar in 2026) which has been shortlisted as “Best Use of an Event to Build a News Brand” at the INMA Global Media Awards.

WSJ is now looking at doing smaller events based around its experts. WSJ Travel Talks, held in New York in March, was billed as an “informal gathering” featuring travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson and reporter Chip Cutter chatting and taking questions from the audience of 50 people (made up of readers who signed up on the website).

Tucker said: “We’re thinking a lot more about giving a bit more personality to our journalism, so promoting the columnists who have got a following, so that people who really enjoy them can get more of them in different versions. That’s what I mean about diversifying our offer. We’re diversifying what we’re doing, but also how we’re doing it.”

From print to AI

The print newspaper remains “really important”: “While all our growth is obviously in digital, we will never neglect the print edition,” Tucker said.

“It’s like a shop window. It’s a showcase, and people really love it, particularly the weekend. So even if it accounts for a much smaller part of our subscriber base, it kind of needs to punch above its weight.”

The WSJ has the biggest daily average print circulation of any audited newspaper in the US. Its average circulation in the six months to 30 September 2025 was 412,400, down 13% year on year.

Tucker also described how the WSJ has been developing its own AI tools allowing it to do “much deeper, more interesting, more insightful journalism” by doing “things that we simply wouldn’t have been able to do before, because we wouldn’t have had the manpower”.

For example the newsbrand has built ORCA, a tool that analyses the output of thousands of podcasts to help journalists find newsworthy lines such as, Tucker suggested, what Trump supporters are saying about the Iran war. ORCA (named because orcas travel in pods) is shortlisted for “Best Use of Generative AI” at the Global Media Awards.

“There’s no way one person could sit and listen to all the podcasts… and, often, people say things on podcasts that they’re not going to say to us directly, but we wouldn’t know because we haven’t listened to the podcast,” Tucker said.

WSJPT lets reporters convert unstructured data like documents or photos into structured data, for example extracting certain categories of information such as donor name, amount and date from 500 pages of campaign finance disclosures so they can be turned into a spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, Egami (the word image backwards) is a reverse image search engine built for investigative journalists, which extracts faces and objects from images in thousands of pages of documents (for example the Epstein files) and enables them to be searched by uploading a photo or typing a description.

WSJ has also built an AI tax assistant based off its own articles and IRS guides, used AI to help with its analysis of the Epstein files, uses AI to translate wire stories into other languages, creates AI bullet-point summaries, and more.

“It’s just like having another massive newsroom of reporters who are all just sitting there waiting to be told what to do. You can get them to do the grunt work that is tedious,” Tucker said.

She said it not just helping to make WSJ journalists more efficient, but is “making our journalism better”, citing an anti-bias tool that “can flag based on a whole number of metrics that we’ve given it as to where we might be skewing one way or the other”.

Asked if the newsbrand makes edits as a result, Tucker said: “It’s food for thought. It means we look at it and go, okay, well, maybe we need to think about that.”

The WSJ is currently being sued for libel by Trump over reporting that he had written a “bawdy” birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 before the financier was charged with sex offences. The newsbrand is defending its reporting.

Tucker noted that the “environment for reporting has definitely got more restrictive” in the US and that people “feel emboldened to push back much harder on what we’re doing”.

“Our legal department is extremely busy at the moment. But I think the key thing for the Journal is to not let that phase us, and to not let us that deter us. And it hasn’t. I’m sure you can tell from our reporting that it hasn’t done.”

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