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**Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour on AI, press freedom, and the future of news**

The Wall Street Journal publisher's thoughts on what it takes for journalism to thrive in 2025.

by Nilay Patel

Mar 10, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

Today, I'm talking with Almar Latour, who is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of its parent company Dow Jones, which you can think of as a huge research and data provider for companies of all sizes. Dow Jones itself is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Latour is a fascinating guy. He started as a news assistant at the Journal in the '90s, spent time as a tech reporter, and eventually rose through the ranks to become CEO in 2020, putting him in charge of how everything makes money. And if you've been paying attention, you know it's a tough time to be making money in the news business, especially the paid news business. In addition to competing with the flood of free content on various social and streaming platforms, the industry is also facing new challenges like fights about copyright and AI and battles with the Trump administration, which has been pushing hard to shut down critical reporting and limit press freedom.

Latour has insight into all of that: On the news side, he's made a big content-use deal with OpenAI while also suing Perplexity for training without permission. On the other side, he's pushing to build his own AI data products for Dow Jones customers. He is a fierce defender of press freedom who fought to have Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich released from Russia after being imprisoned for more than a year. But at the same time, he works at News Corp, whose chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has deep ties to President Donald Trump and who has overseen a vastly polarized and politicized era of news media.

So I asked Latour about all of that and really pushed him on a few of his answers—even right at the top of the conversation, when I asked him about the Journal cutting a huge chunk of its tech reporting team literally the day before we recorded. To his credit, Latour was game and he hung in there, but you'll hear him congratulate me for almost getting him to slip up. I did my best; I think many of you will have thoughts about it.

Okay: Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

**Almar Latour, you are CEO of Dow Jones and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Welcome to Decoder.**

Great to be here. Thank you.

I have a lot to talk about with you. There's an entire set of complicated AI questions that might be existential for the media industry, but you're heavily invested in building some of that technology and some of those services, which I think is interesting. There's the general state of the press in 2025, which I want to talk to you about. I know you're very interested in press freedom.

But it happens that I have you on the day after the news, so I want to start with the news. Just last night, The Wall Street Journal, of which Dow Jones is the publisher, restructured how it covers tech and media. That involved cutting about 10 or 15 editors and reporters. Obviously, I'm very interested in how you structure a newsroom to cover tech. Why make that decision? Why get smaller?

First, this is a newsroom decision, so this is squarely in the terrain of [editor-in-chief] Emma Tucker, who's a new editor, relatively speaking. She's in year two, moving into year three. Emma was hired with a remit of helping to increase engagement with our existing readers, to expand our readership, and to maintain and enhance the quality of our coverage. She has set out over the past two years to rethink how she wants to offer news with The Wall Street Journal newsroom.

Her consistent message, and this is one that I subscribe to, is that distinctive journalism is what makes the difference. It's about knowing the interesting story, the story behind the story, and to have exclusive journalism and insights. That I say as a preface because Emma has been making changes to nearly every part of The Wall Street Journal and continues to do that.

So what happened yesterday was a continuation of that. Generally, when you look at the changes that she's brought in—I'm not speaking specifically about the San Francisco bureau but tech—it's been new talent. She has an antenna for what she thinks works there. And one of the areas where that's been very pronounced in recent months is in Washington, D.C. That has gone through several cycles of changes. She's brought in new people, and that has had consequences. The marching orders are slightly different when there is a closer connection to the center of the newsroom, where the decisions about news can be made in the context of a broader story that's happening around the world, rather than in isolation around a certain topic. So that's the context for yesterday.

I'm not going to comment on specific individuals or Emma's specific plans. I'll leave that to her. I've worked with quite a few of those people. As you know, I was a tech reporter myself. But overall, what Emma has focused on, and what the Journal and Dow Jones are focusing on, is going deeper and having more exclusivity, more "proprietary content." Moments like yesterday are absolutely never easy.

I think I see a thesis of Dow Jones as a company, and we'll get to the big picture in a second here. The idea is you're going to give a bunch of people in the business world an information edge, whether it's with the Dow Jones Information Services, some of the AI tools, or with The Wall Street Journal, which gets a bunch of scoops and tells people stuff they didn't know before. I'm just looking at this broadly. I'm looking at Dow Jones as part of News Corp. I'm looking at News Corp's financials from last month. Revenue at Dow Jones is up to $600 million. That's up 3 percent. Your earnings are up 7 percent to $174 million. But the cuts are in tech, which is dominating the world. I'm just wondering about that resource allocation because that's the role of the publisher.

Well, it is in the sense that the newsroom has a budget, and we support quality journalism. Frankly, we are so successful at this moment as a company that all of our investments are in enhancing the quality of our journalism, data, analytics, etc. Getting better news, getting better information is the mission, and we are investing in that.

So, I just want to correct one simplification that sometimes comes to the surface at moments like this. I don't think you intended to do that, but I think it's important to make a distinction. It's super hard when you go through what happened yesterday and many other times in journalism. But this shift, like any other shift that Emma has gone through, is not to eke out more profit by having fewer resources. There is an overall climate inside our company. You see our earnings, revenue, and subscription base growing. We will invest wherever there's a good business case to be made. Tech and the cross-section of tech with policy, politics, global trade, and society is one of the top priorities for Dow Jones, and one of the top stories in the world. So, don't take a snapshot and say, "Okay, we're going to stop there." This is a top priority. Tech will permeate everything—it is permeating everything right now. Look at Washington, D.C. or at the announcements from President Emmanuel Macron in France. So, don't take the snapshot; that is where I was headed. This is a moment in time. We can talk again in a year, and our tech coverage should be broader, deeper, and probably have a larger following.

I run a tech publication—what is nominally a tech publication—and we are heavily invested in covering policy. One of the lines we've always used, a cliché even, is that "The Verge can cover everything because everything is now a tech story." That was a way 10 years ago of maintaining a broad focus, and now, it's very real. Elon Musk is at the State of the Union. You can see the tech giants fighting tooth and nail against the Digital Services Act in the EU, and that is now a part of American foreign policy. Do you see that as, "Okay, maybe all of The Wall Street Journal is about tech in that way?" Is that getting more expansive for you?

There is a current of tech that runs through every story at The Wall Street Journal. It runs through everything at Dow Jones in two ways: as a story and as technology. There's not a part of The Wall Street Journal or Dow Jones where tech does not feature. Having people cover tech in isolation is one way of covering this. In addition, tech is a core part of many other beats and areas that we cover. Tech is a horizontal and a vertical at the same time.

We'll come back to the AI deals you've struck. I want to talk about them expansively. Just in this context, like so many publishers, you've struck a deal with OpenAI and other AI companies. Are those providing enough revenue for you to invest against in the newsroom, or are you still in wait-and-see mode with those deals?

I don't think we should tether our investments in AI to any individual AI deal. That's not how I look at it. It's not like, "Oh, AI brings in this much money, and now I can invest this much in AI." You could, I guess, rationalize it that way. We have our investment priorities, and we're following a game plan that we've been following for a while. It meanders every once in a while, but the goal is pretty clear. We intend on growing in three ways. One is by going deeper, so investing in the depth of our content, our data, and our analytics by growing wider.

We do this by adding new areas of expertise. Just last week, we announced our agreement to acquire Oxford Analytica. Going deep into geopolitics is an addition. But in future investments, once it's a part of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, we will probably invest in going deeper into that area of geopolitics. Then, the third wave is by connecting everything that we have. There should be easier access to the data that underlies everything at Dow Jones and everything that we do at The Wall Street Journal.

Now, to your question, investing in the newsroom is a goal in itself. We are a successful, leading, subscription-driven news organization, and we grow by investing in our journalism, not by shrinking our journalism. Sometimes there's a temptation to be in austerity mode and to just take away in order to eke out a profit. That's not us, and that's not how we're growing whatsoever.

I think it's more than a temptation for most media businesses right now. That is the reality of the situation, right? It costs more to make the information than most people can return on it.

Yeah, but if your answer to that time and time again is, "Okay, I'll cut in order to make ends meet," then you're not addressing something at the base. You're not addressing something in your model. You might not be addressing something correctly in the way you're organized or where you're focused. That, to me, was never an acceptable method to grow or create great journalism. I understand that sometimes you have your back against the wall as a company in any industry. You may have to cut in order to make ends meet, but that's not a strategy.

People get that wrong. I think you're absolutely right. That might be a prevailing tendency, but I don't think it should be. The prevailing focus should be about making a difference in the news and information that you offer. How do you make that distinctive? How do you add value? How do you allow people to make decisions based on that? How do you convince people that they should recognize the value of the information that you offer?

People in the past used to say, "You're a subscription business. You're The Wall Street Journal. You're all about business, and therefore, that doesn't apply to anything else." I don't think that is true. I think people recognize the value of a lot of different types of information. It doesn't just have to be about business. So, I actually think there's a lot of opportunity in shifting from this austerity mode to creation and building mode. Easier said than done, and sometimes, you have to step away from things that just aren't working.

I think that recognition of value is very challenging. I understand why it happens in the business community. I even understand why it happens for us in the tech press because it's often tradable. You can pay a high rate to The Wall Street Journal if you are a Wall Street trader, an investor, or some other kind of business professional because the information has a clear value that you can use to trade upon to make a deal or an investment, to buy or sell a stock.

I think that information is not tradeable for the average consumer. They just open TikTok. Maybe there's some influencer reading The Wall Street Journal to them for free. That elimination of scarcity, I think, has been the fundamental challenge. It was the challenge when we went to social media, the challenge when we went to these social video platforms. It feels like the challenge again for AI, right? The AI platforms are going to take all of the world's information and completely eliminate even the scarcity of having to click. They're just going to tell you what the models have read on the internet. Do you perceive that as existential a challenge as some of your peers in the media do?

I think you're absolutely right in that the bar on being distinctive with the content, news, or information that you create has gone way up. So, you have to be more discerning where you focus. You ask about the existential threat around AI, and that goes back to the recognition of value. I want to make sure that the industry—certainly Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, and all of our publications—don't fall into a trap that is similar to two decades ago when all information had to be free, people took scraps from search engines, and then found out over time that they've effectively lost, that we seeded that market. So, that's why we are investing time and resources right now into making sure that large players in the AI space recognize that value.

Our push is to make sure that there is a commercial agreement around that. And I think that is the preferred outcome in many cases—both sides of that fence. Where we can't reach a commercial agreement, where there are fundamental differences of opinion, we are prepared, in some cases, to say, "Then we'll fight it out in court." So, we've walked both paths, with a preference for the first.

I'm still answering your question as to what's existential here and is there an existential threat. You spun it forward and we can get through that, what it means for the end user and how consumers respond to that. But I think first, we have to get the starting blocks. These are the companies that are providing generative AI, UX, and new interactions for consumers. They have gotten to that point by using information. We need an acknowledgement that the information that has value, certainly our information, and that if you want to use that information on an ongoing basis, that some of your generative AI-produced content answers to queries are current and reliable. You'll have to pay us for access if you value that. That part we cannot skip over. There's a whole other part of this where we don't yet exactly know how the user is going to interact, but we see the trending there. We have to get that part right. We're in the middle of that, or maybe we're at the first part of that still.

I'm going to ask you one more very existential philosophical question, and I need to get back to having you explain the company—

Yeah. All my favorite topics.

There's that line, that a lie goes around the world six times when the truth is putting on shoes. It feels like we might be describing a world where regular people are awash in a sea of free lies that come to them on social media. The social media companies are all giving up on fact checks. Various billionaires say whatever they want on podcasts with no pushback. And what you are providing is a very expensive source of truth, or hopefully what I am providing is an affordable source of truth. That's a big discrepancy, right?

I would say we're as affordable as a cup of coffee a day. Everyone drinks coffee. I think it's a myth that access to reliable information is unaffordable. It is an individual choice. I realize it's a hard choice to make if you don't have significant disposable income, and that's what you're indicating, but I do believe that there's a choice to be made.

I understand why people would buy The Wall Street Journal or some of Dow Jones' products, which we should come to. But that's the bigger picture, right? It's convincing the next consumer that they should pay for information as opposed to picking a filter bubble on social media. Whether that's AI, social media, or if it's just algorithms, that seems like the challenge the media faces.

The challenge is to convince someone that it's to their benefit to invest in having access to reliable information. Whether that's for making decisions in the realm of investments, technology, policy, or whether it's hyperlocal and I actually want to understand what's going on in my community, some of that I might get from AI. But some of that I might not. I might want to invest a small amount of money into understanding what's happening in my community. There's some examples of that popping up.

In response to this huge question that you're asking, I think we'll see innovation in journalism and a lot of creativity—already and in years to come—where, undeniably, there's this flood of information of mixed quality. There's also, undeniably, a huge demand for reliable information. People are craving it more than ever before. In fact, the more noise there is, the more people are confused and the more they are asking, "Hey, tell me what this means."

We see this in our data. We see this when there are moments of friction in society, in business, or in geopolitics with any market. We see a spike in people coming to us for free, but we also see a spike in subscriptions. Demand for reliable information, I think, has gone up as the pool of unreliable or uncertain information has grown. Some of it might be reliable, some of it might not be.

I think you cast that as an existential risk. I can cast that as an opportunity. I like to be aware of the existential risk and take the precautions there, but mainly focus on the opportunity and meeting that demand. I don't think we have met that demand by any stretch. I think there's a huge opportunity for us and for other publications lying ahead to meet that demand. I think that demand will actually only grow.

This is a good place to back up a little. We've talked a lot about The Wall Street Journal. I think people know about The Wall Street Journal. I think Decoder listeners also probably know about Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, which is the parent company of The Wall Street Journal. Describe how all of that fits together in your role as CEO of Dow Jones.

In its most simplified form, I think of Dow Jones as a Rubik's Cube, and inside is all of our premium journalism, exclus