- Dow Jones laid off 10 people on the business side last week, the latest in ongoing reductions.
- Wall Street Journal insiders are prepping for a content overhaul and potential cuts later this summer.
- Reporters’ coverage areas are being scrutinized to identify areas of overlap.
A steady drip of layoffs continues at Dow Jones, which laid off another 10 people in the last week of June. The roles were mostly finance, sales, and marketing people who work across Dow Jones properties, which include The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch.
Speculation about where and when layoffs will hit has swirled since News Corp., Dow Jones’ parent, announced in February there would be a 5% reduction in staff in 2023 — or about 1,250 roles — across all its businesses. The media sector has seen thousands of layoffs over the past 12 months, from digital upstarts to large legacy newsrooms like the Journal’s.
At an all-hands meeting earlier in June, Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour acknowledged more layoffs were coming while underscoring that more than 1,000 people had been hired in the past year, two inside sources said. Like other news organizations, Dow Jones has task forces exploring news and other applications of AI, which has led to concerns more broadly that the tech will replace employees.
The Journal newsroom has largely been spared, but EIC Emma Tucker is conducting a sweeping content review. Insiders expect her to announce a new plan for the newsroom later in the summer, along with a potential reorganization and cuts. Reporters’ beats, or coverage areas, are being scrutinized to identify areas of overlap, which could result in some reassignments, a third person said.
Tucker already has shaken up the top editor ranks. Since she took over Rupert Murdoch’s crown jewel in February after running his Sunday Times in London, she’s installed some of her own people from that UK newsroom — Liz Harris and Taneth Evans — and named a popular Journal veteran, Charles Forelle, as deputy editor in chief.
Meantime, she’s parted ways with longtime editors Karen Pensiero, Neal Lipschutz, and Jason Anders and most recently, Thorold Barker, who oversaw the Journal’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa coverage.
Tucker has gotten largely positive reviews for changes she’s made, including doing away with honorifics (like Mr. or Ms.) and corporate designations (like Co. or Inc.) to streamline writing. She’s encouraged reporters to pursue livelier stories, recently holding up two articles as examples: a “Succession”-esque feature about how Bernard Arnault groomed his children to run LVMH and another about the feeling of dread surrounding the 2024 presidential election.
People also expect her to overhaul the cumbersome front-page editing process for top enterprise stories and deemphasize commodity news in favor of more investigative pieces.
But some are eager for the uncertainty to end and worry about the content plan ushering in more layoffs or an overreliance on data in determining news coverage.
“There’s definitely some amount of anxiousness,” one of the insiders said.
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