Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker has outlined her vision for the paper following the completion of a months-long content review, Confider has learned.
Tucker, who joined the Journal from the Sunday Times in London in February, addressed the newsroom at a recent all-hands meeting to detail her “audience first” strategy and emphasize the need for the writing in the Journal to be more engaging.
“Our review found that the most powerful thing we can achieve in the newsroom is to better engage readers with our digital products with a view to reducing churn,” Tucker emailed staff following the Sept. 21 meeting. “Specifically, we will think more deeply about journalism that brings readers back to our digital products more often and has them reading more while they’re with us.”
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The “audience first” strategy is guided by a set of principles that instructs staff to ask at the start of every story who the target audience is, what they want to know, how might the Journal broaden its audience, and what format is best for telling that story. According to multiple people who attended the meeting, Tucker wants to broaden coverage areas of the Journal in the hopes of attracting a younger readership (the average age of a WSJ reader is currently 59).
In March, Confider first reported that Tucker was eager to move the paper away from commodity news in favor of enterprise journalism and that she intended to slash the paper’s laborious page-one process. The Brit is expected to streamline the paper’s Standards process, which is known for having an outsized role and at times slowing down the publication of stories.
“We will work harder to always bring ‘the WSJ angle’ to every story; go deep over broad; unique over commodity; and be faster while we do it. We will also be making efforts to make our writing more accessible, while retaining our rigorous standards,” she wrote to staff.
But one Journal staffer told Confider, “there are a lot of people on edge in the newsroom waiting for what comes next,” adding that they and many of their colleagues fear there will be a round of layoffs now that the content review is complete.
Meanwhile, the paper’s D.C. bureau is struggling to contain a mouse infestation that several staffers have complained to management about. “There are mice running around the office nonstop,” one political reporter told Confider. A rep for the Journal declined to comment.
