Pod Insights Decoder Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour on AI, press freedom, and the future of news About this episode Almar Latour is the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and also CEO of its parent company, Dow Jones — itself a part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Almar's been with the paper since the 90s, and now he's got insight into all the modern messes. He's made a big deal with OpenAI, while also suing Perplexity — all while building his own AI data products for Dow Jones customers.
He's also a strong defender of press freedom who fought to have Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich released from Russia after being imprisoned for more than a year — while News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch famously has deep ties to Trump and has overseen a vastly polarized and politicized era of news media.
Links:
Here are the WSJ journalists whose jobs were eliminated | Talking Biz News
OpenAI, WSJ parent strike content deal valued at over $250M | Wall Street Journal
News Corp sues Perplexity for ripping off WSJ, New York Post | The Verge
Dow Jones negotiates AI usage rights with 4,000 publishers | Nieman Lab
Rupert Murdoch joins Trump in Oval Office | The Hollywood Reporter
WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich is free | Wall Street Journal
Trump sues Iowa newspaper and top pollster | Reuters
The FCC is a weapon in Trump’s war on free speech | The Verge
CBS considers caving on Trump lawsuit to save Skydance merger | The Verge
Why The Atlantic signed a deal with OpenAI | Decoder
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/626229
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 11,514 words · 11 speakers
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1:31 Speaker 04 Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Omar Latour, who is publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of its parent company Dow Jones, which is most easily thought of as a huge research and data provider for other companies. And Dow Jones itself is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which we'll come back to. Now, Omar 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 all of it 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. There are the usual challenges of competing with social media platforms flooded with free content,
2:15 Speaker 04 but also new challenges like AI copyright fights, and now even the Trump administration, which has been pushing hard to shut down critical reporting and limit press freedom. Almar has insight into all of that. He's made deals with AI companies like OpenAI. He's suing other AI companies like Perplexity for training without permission, and he's pushing to build his own AI data products for Dow Jones customers. On top of that, he is a fierce defender of press freedom, who fought to have Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich released after being imprisoned in Russia for over a year, while still working at News Corp., whose chairman Rupert Murdoch has deep ties to Trump and who has overseen a vastly more polarized and politicized news media. So Almar and I talked about all of that, and I really pushed him on a few of his answers,
3:00 Speaker 04 especially 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, Almar was game, and he hung in there for all of it, but you will hear him literally congratulate me for almost getting him to slip up. I did my best. There's a lot going on in this episode, and I think many of you will have thoughts on it. So let's just get right into it. Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Here we go.
3:40 Speaker 04 Almar Latour, you are CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Welcome to Decoder.
3:45 Speaker 05 Great to be here. Thank you.
3:46 Speaker 04 I have a lot to talk about with you. There's an entire set of, I think, complicated AI questions that are existential for the media industry, but you're heavily invested in building some of that technology and building some of those services, which I think is interesting.
3:59 Speaker 05 Yes.
3:59 Speaker 04 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.
4:05 Speaker 05 Yes.
4:06 Speaker 04 But it happens that I have you on the day after the news. And so I want to start with news.
4:10 Speaker 05 Yes.
4:11 Speaker 04 Just last night, the Wall Street Journal, of which you are the publisher, restructured how it covers tech and media. That involves cutting about 10 or 12, 15 editors and reporters.
4:22 Speaker 04 Obviously, I'm personally very interested in how you structure a newsroom to cover tech. Why make that decision? Why get smaller?
4:27 Speaker 05 This is a newsroom decision, so this is squarely the terrain of Emma Tucker, who is a new editor, relatively speaking. She's in year two, moving into year three. Emma was hired with the remit of helping to increase engagement with our existing readers and to expand our readership and to maintain and enhance the quality of our coverage. She has set out, over the past two years, really, 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 distinctive journalism is what makes the difference.
5:10 Speaker 05 Knowing the interesting story, the story behind the story, and to have exclusive journalism and exclusive insights. So 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. And so what happened yesterday is a continuation of that. And generally, when you look at, and I'm not speaking specifically about the San Francisco Bureau about tech, but generally, when you look at the changes that have been brought in, she has brought in new talent, and she has an antenna for what she thinks works there. And one of the areas where you see that very pronounced in recent months even is in Washington,
5:55 Speaker 05 DC, that has gone through several cycles of changes. And so she's brought in new people, that has had consequences. And the marching orders are slightly different, where there is a closer connection to the center of the newsroom, where the decisions about news can be made in context of a broader story, a macro 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 specific plans from Emma. 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 as well. But overall, what Emma has focused on
6:36 Speaker 05 and what the Journal and Dow Jones are focusing on is going deeper and having more exclusivity, more quote unquote proprietary content. And those moments like yesterday are absolutely never easy.
6:49 Speaker 04 I think I see a thesis of Dow Jones as a company, and we'll come to the big picture in a second here.
6:53 Speaker 05 Yes, yes, yes.
6:54 Speaker 04 The idea is you're going to give a bunch of people in the business world an edge, an information edge, whether it's with the Dow Jones Information Services or 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. But I'm just kind of looking at this broadly. Dow Jones is part of News Corp. I'm looking at News Corp's latest financials from last month. Revenue at Dow Jones is up to 600 million. That's up 3%. Your earnings are up 7% to 174 million. But the cuts are like in tech, which is dominating the world. And I'm just wondering about that resource allocation because that's the role of the publisher, I think.
7:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, it is in the sense that the newsroom has a budget and we support quality journalism. And frankly, we are so successful at this moment as a company that all of our investments are in enhancing the quality of our journalism, enhancing quality of our data or analytics, et cetera. And so getting better news, getting better information, that is the mission. And so we are investing in that. So I just want to correct one simplification that that sometimes comes to the surface at moments like this. And I think, I don't think you intended to do that, but I think it's important to make a distinction. And this is
8:13 Speaker 05 hard when you go through what is at an individual level, super, super, super hard, what happened yesterday and many 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 a an overall climate inside our company. You see our earnings growing and you see our revenue grow and our subscription base growing. We will invest wherever there is a good business case to be made and tech. And the cross section of tech with policy, with politics, with global trade, with society.
8:54 Speaker 05 Is one of the top stories of number top priorities for Dow Jones, 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 will permeate tech will permeate. Everything is permeating everything right now. Looking at Washington or or looking at the announcements from Macron or in France. And so don't take the snapshot, I guess, is what I was headed at that. This is a moment in time. Talk again in a year and our tech coverage should be broader, deeper and probably have a larger following.
9:32 Speaker 04 I think one of the the questions I have, I run a tech publication. What is nominally a tech publication? And we are, we are heavily invested in covering policy.
9:42 Speaker 05 Yes.
9:43 Speaker 04 One of the lines we've always used, a cliche even, is the version cover everything because everything is now a tech story. And that was a way, I think, 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 is? Okay, maybe all of the Wall Street Journal is about tech in that way. Is that is that getting more expansive for you?
10:13 Speaker 05 There is a current of tech that runs through every story at the Wall Street Journal, runs through everything at Dow Jones. In two ways, as a story and as technology. Right, there's not a part of the Wall Street Journal, there's not a part of Dow Jones where tech does not feature. And therefore, having people cover tech in isolation is is one, one way of covering this. In addition, tech becomes a core part of many other beats and many other areas that we cover. Tech is a horizontal and it's a vertical at the same time.
10:48 Speaker 04 We'll come back to the AI deals you you struck. I want to talk about them extensively, but just in this context. Like so many publishers, you've struck a deal with OpenAI, you've struck deals with other AI companies. Are those providing enough revenue for you to invest against in the newsroom? Or is, are you still in wait and see mode with those deals?
11:08 Speaker 05 I don't think we should tether our investments in AI to any individual AI deal. So that's not how I look at it. And so 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.
11:22 Speaker 04 Or the newsroom.
11:23 Speaker 05 Or the, well, AI in the newsroom or in the newsroom. We have our investment priorities and we're following a game plan that we've been following for a while and 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, of our data, of our analytics. By growing wider, and that is by adding new areas of expertise. So last week, we announced our agreement to acquire Oxford Analytica. So going deep in geopolitics, that's an addition. But in future investments, once they're part of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal,
12:05 Speaker 05 we will probably invest in going deeper into that, into that area of geopolitics. And then the third way of growing is by connecting everything that we have, meaning that there should be easier access to the data that underlies everything of Dow Jones for everything that we do at the Wall Street Journal. Now, as to your question, investing in the newsroom, 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. So we're not, there's sometimes a temptation to be in media and austerity mode and, and just take away in order to eke out a profit. That's not us, and that's not how we're growing
12:50 Speaker 05 whatsoever.
12:51 Speaker 04 I think it's more than a temptation for most media businesses right now. That is the reality of the situation, right? It it costs more to make the information than most people can return on it.
13:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, but if your answer to that time and time again is, okay, I'll I'll cut in order to make ends meet, 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, maybe where you're focused. So that, to me, was never an acceptable method to grow or to create great journalism. I understand that sometimes, as a company in any industry, you can have your back against the wall. You may have to cut in order to make ends meet, but that's not a strategy.
13:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:36 Speaker 05 And so, but people get that wrong. I think you're absolutely right that that that might be sort of a prevailing tendency, but I don't think it should be. The prevailing focus, I think, should be where do you make 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? And people in the past used to say, oh, you're a subscription business, you're the Wall Street Journal because 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 value of a lot of different types of information.
14:20 Speaker 05 It doesn't just have to be about business. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity, actually, in shifting from this austerity mode to creation mode and building mode. Easier said than done, and sometimes you have to step away from some things that just aren't working.
14:37 Speaker 04 And that recognition of value is very challenging. I understand why it happens in the business community. I even understand what happens for us in the tech press, because it's often tradable. So you can pay a high rate to the Wall Street Journal if you are a Wall Street trader or an investor, some other kind of business professional, because the information has such clear value to you that you can use to trade upon in some way, to make a deal or make an investment, buy or sell a stock. I think for the average consumer, that information is not tradable. They can just open TikTok, and maybe there's some influencer reading the Wall Street Journal to them for free. And that Elimination of scarcity, I think, has been the fundamental challenge.
15:19 Speaker 04 It was the challenge when it's a social media, when the challenge when it's 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 now completely eliminates even the scarcity of having to click. They're just going to tell you what what the models have read on the Internet. Do you perceive that as as existential a challenge as some of your peers in the media do?
15:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, first, I think you're absolutely right in that the bar on being distinctive by by content or news or information that you create has gone way up. And so you have to be more discerning into where you focus that. You ask about the existential threat around AI. That goes back to the recognition of value. And in first instance, I want to make sure that the industry, but certainly Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal and all of our publications don't fall into a trap that is similar to two decades ago, where when all information had to be free and people took scraps from search engines, etc.
16:23 Speaker 05 And and then found out over time that, hey, we've lost effectively that we seeded that that market. And so that's why we're investing time and resources right now into making sure that large players in the AI space recognize that value. And our push in first instance is to make sure that there is a commercial agreement around that. And I think in many cases, that is on both sides of that fence, the preferred outcome. And then where we can't reach a commercial agreement, where there are fundamental differences of opinion, we are prepared in some cases to say, OK, then we'll fight it out in court.
17:06 Speaker 05 And so we've walked both paths with a with a preference for the first. But I'm still answering your question as to what's existential here and is there an existential threat? And you spun it forward and we can get to that, what it means for the end user and how consumers respond to that. But I think. First, we got to get that at the starting blocks, if you will, which is, okay, these are the companies that are providing Gen AI UX and new interactions for consumers. They have gotten to that point by using information where you need an acknowledgement that information has value, certainly our information. And that if you want to use that information on an ongoing basis,
17:48 Speaker 05 that make sure that some of your Gen AI produced content, answer to queries is current and is reliable. You'll have to pay us for access if you value that. And so 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. But that part, we have to get right. And we're in the middle of that. Or maybe we're at the first part of that still.
18:20 Speaker 04 Yeah. I'm going to ask you one more, like, very existential philosophical question. And I need to get back to having you explain the company. I need to get to the questions.
18:29 Speaker 05 All my favorite topics.
18:31 Speaker 04 You know, there's that line, 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. Right? That come to them on social media. The social media companies are giving up on fact checks. Various billionaires say whatever they want on podcasts with no pushback. And then what you are providing is a very expensive source of truth. Or hopefully what I am providing is an affordable source of truth.
19:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, I would say.
19:03 Speaker 04 That's a big discrepancy, right?
19:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, I would say we're as affordable as a cup of coffee, like a day. I mean, everyone drinks coffee. Like, it's not, it's not, I think it's a myth that access to reliable information is unaffordable. It is, 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 is, that there's also a choice to be made.
19:30 Speaker 04 I understand why people would buy the Wall Street Journal or some of Dow Jones's products we should come to, but that's the bigger picture, right? It's convincing the net, the next consumer that they should pay for information as opposed to picking a filter bubble on social media. Whether or not that's AI or if it's social media, if it's just algorithms or whatever, that seems like the challenge the media faces.
19:54 Speaker 05 The game is, or the challenge is 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, or technology, or policy, or whether it's hyper-local 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, and I might want to invest a small amount of money to understand what's happening in my community. And there's some examples of that popping up, and I think we'll see, in response to
20:34 Speaker 05 this huge question that you're asking, we will see innovation in journalism and a lot of creativity in already, in any years to come, where undeniably, with the truth that you just presented, that there's this flood of information, mixed quality, undeniably there's also 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 reaching for, hey, tell me what this means. We see this in our data, right?
21:11 Speaker 05 We see this when there are moments of friction in society, or in business, or on geopolitics, in any market, we see a spike in people coming to us for free, but also we see a spike in subscriptions. Demand for reliable information, I think, has gone up.
21:37 Speaker 05 As the pool of unreliable information has grown, or uncertain information, some of it might be reliable, some of it might not be. Yeah. So I think you cast that as an existential risk. I can also cast that as an opportunity. I like to be aware of the existential risk, take the precautions there, but mainly focus on the opportunity and meeting that demand. And I think we haven't 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. And I think that demand will actually only grow.
22:17 Speaker 05 We need to take a short break. We'll be right back.
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23:57 Speaker 04 Welcome back. I'm talking with Almar Latour. Before the break, we were talking a lot about his role as publisher of The Wall Street Journal, which is half of his job. But the other half is being CEO of Dow Jones. You're probably thinking that has something to do with the very famous Dow Jones Industrial Average, but the company actually sold that off long ago. Now, it's much more of a data and insights provider. 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 Dakota listeners also probably know about Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, which is the parent company of Wall Street Journal. Describe how all of that fits together in your role as CEO of Dow Jones.
24:34 Speaker 05 In its most simplified form, think of Dow Jones as, think of it as a Rubik's Cube. And inside of it is all of our premium journalism, our exclusives, our explanation of what's happening right now. There's our proprietary data that we have on many different sectors in the global economy. There's factiva, many sources, thousands and thousands of sources from around the world, sitting inside that Rubik's Cube. Each tile on that Rubik's Cube is a way to get out of Dow Jones what is important and relevant to you. Maybe I want a couple of different tiles. Maybe I want the whole thing.
25:19 Speaker 05 That's fundamentally a way of thinking about how we operate and how ultimately also we're organized. And AI is actually helping a great deal with this and is accelerating this. Generative AI, AI has been, and automation has been with Dow Jones for a long, long time. Let's then make that a little bit more complex than that. But if one of those styles is about bond trading, I ought to be able to get all information, premium information, live information, but also analytics and forecasting out of Dow Jones to help me in my job. The way that we're organized is sort of the cards that I was dealt when I took over
26:00 Speaker 05 almost five years ago as CEO was to to look at Dow Jones as a platform of verticals. You've got business news, it's both horizontal and a vertical, but that's the Wall Street Journal, as you say, needs no huge explanation there. There's wealth and investing, where we have Barron's, Market Watch, financial news, which is a title in the UK, but also private equity news. We've got a compliance arm that has data on compliance. It helps companies discern, should I do business with this person or not? Are they on a sanctions list or not? We've added since an energy arm and within that commodities and petrochemicals.
26:42 Speaker 05 We've added a leadership arm that organically, looking at what it takes to be a modern leader. And each of these verticals, if you will, are successful when they do four things. You have to have news and leading news in that particular vertical, in that particular area of concentration. So pick your industry, we've got to, we've got to be, unless you have that, you're not relevant. Second, you have to have proprietary data. Some of that can come out of the news, some of it you have to build, some of it you have to, you have to buy, and we've done that. If you have those two things, you can do proper analytics. AI helps with that to some degree.
27:24 Speaker 05 And that's where the value keeps on going up, if you sell products that can do forecasting and analytics. And then the fourth factor is convening power, that is, bringing people in that industry, in that sector, in that vertical, bringing them together. And if you have those four, you get actually a mini network effect inside that industry.
27:46 Speaker 05 We've seen that, for example, happen, and it didn't happen by, it happened by design. We've executed against this with our manager, Joel Lang, who runs our risk and compliance business. If you have all those four parts, then you see the leaders in that industry come together and, let's say, take the risk and compliance. You see compliance officers coming together and our compliance council at Dovels and in other places. And so now you have thought leaders there. Well, the procurement officers who buy our data products and see that, oh, yeah, the people that are leading my department or that are leading my company are talking on a Dow Jones platform about these big themes. So it anchors Dow Jones more deeply, whether that's just an
28:30 Speaker 05 observation and anecdotal, or whether that actually translates into business, often it translates into business. That has the same effect on our analytical products. And then if you add news to it in that risk vertical, we have mentioned internally that we will have a risk journal. So you will have risk industry folks, compliance officers and the like, tap into that risk news product to actually start their workday and understand of what's happening. Now, end to end, we are present in your workflow in that industry. And by the way, since we're the Wall Street Journal, and that's an extension as well, we're probably also, when you go home, we're still with you in
29:12 Speaker 05 another way. So that's the view of the company and our operating model. Build verticals that have these four parts at a minimum. Go deeper and make that exclusive. This is why what Emma is doing in the Wall Street Journal newsroom really matters. More exclusives, more distinctive journalism helps with that first part, with the news, obviously. We've built and bought and created more proprietary data. We've spent well in excess of a billion dollars on getting companies that are specialized in that added to our roster. We're doing more analytics and even a little bit of consulting. We're never going to be a consulting company, but that's an outflow of analytics. And then convening power, I think, for a long time in the media.
29:56 Speaker 05 Sort of misread as just events, but it's something bigger, far bigger than that. I think it's a subscription business. It's a recurring revenue business, should be. It doesn't mean that you can't have sponsorship for it, but it is fundamental to anchoring the decision makers of a certain industry in your platform. So we have that stack. When you, when we have that, we call it a full stack. So we've got a full stack in risk. We're building a full stack in energy and subsets of energy. And so we're going deeper there. And then you see us in the future. It's a scalable model because we now understand how do you build these verticals? Either we can use Mind the Wall Street Journal for new, new verticals because we see what
30:41 Speaker 05 people gravitate to, where do we have the expertise and then build on that? Or we can inorganically add as well, or we can organically start outside the Wall Street Journal newsroom. So going deeper, going wider, and then connecting everything is where ultimately, if you go back to the Rubik's Cube, if you want to buy that whole Rubik's Cube, we will also make that possible for you. And so we were making sure that these magnificent data pools are going to be available. And some of this is of course still in the works, but going to be available to our journalists so that they can do exclusive work with that.
31:19 Speaker 04 You're describing Dow Jones as something that makes really high quality rigorous information across its newspapers, magazines, across its data products. That sits within News Corp. How often do you hang out with Rupert Murdoch?
31:33 Speaker 05 I wouldn't put it in the category of hanging out whatsoever. This is a healthy, friendly interaction. He's chairman emeritus. He's built the caricature on a side, just he's built enormous media success stories over time. And so from a business point of view, there's certainly in my early days, there was a lot to learn from like, how do you create businesses and such? But there's a, from News Corp, there's been nothing but support for our, our growth story.
32:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:06 Speaker 05 And so I'm very thankful for that. That's Rupert, it's Lachlan, it's also Robert Thompson. It's a whole apparatus. But the access to capital that we've had as Dow Jones to five years ago, we hadn't done, I think, an acquisition for well over a decade. Now we've done billions in acquisitions. That's support. That's, I would say, that's a vote of confidence for the direction that we're taking for the strategy that I outlined to you, going deeper, growing wider, connecting things. But there's also a deep respect for the independence of the Wall Street Journal and the value that comes with that. And so I've seen that consistently applied. That's my answer to your hangout question.
32:46 Speaker 04 Rupert Murdoch plays on both sides of the information crisis, right? You can, you can watch his other properties create whatever reality is politically expedient for Donald Trump. And then I can see the Wall Street Journal rigorously cover the impact of tariffs, all the way down to the opinion pages, which sometimes say the tariffs are bad.
33:03 Speaker 05 Oh, no, they don't just say tariffs are bad. Or the opinion pages, as Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, yesterday in his press conference, said, I don't often, I'm paraphrasing here, I don't often quote the Wall Street Journal, but they said that this trade war is the stupidest trade war in history, or something along those lines. We have run, we don't hold back, or opinion pages don't hold back, and their assessment based on well-established principles of free markets and free people. And so that, we both smile for obvious reasons, I'm sure you ask about it. That is core to who we are. The independence to make that judgment is core to who we are. And yeah, for my part, I'm
33:46 Speaker 05 focused on the Dow Jones part of making sure that that sings.
33:50 Speaker 04 But do you see that contradiction? Do you think your team see that contradiction? That you're trying to sell really high-quality information while another part of the structure that has the same ownership is contributing to an information crisis?
34:04 Speaker 05 Listen, I can't comment because of the shared ownership structure. I'm not going to comment on my colleagues at Fox. We had yesterday protesters outside on Fox Square. And people are protesting that while the reporters and the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones are doing their job. So there is an awareness of the perception of Fox and what we're focused on. But I think there's also a great awareness amongst our staff and has been for now over 15 years that those two things are separate. Without specifically commenting on how you characterize that, because I'm just not going to get into that.
34:45 Speaker 04 I want to ask the last decoder question and I want to end by talking about AI kind of at length here. You've had to make a lot of decisions, right? You've changed the way the company works.
34:54 Speaker 05 A lot, a lot, yeah.
34:55 Speaker 04 You obviously have a way of thinking about the company that's very specific. Although I will say Rubik's cubes are meant to be solved. And I'm not sure that you want anyone solved. I think you want them to remix the cube, not solve it. But what's your framework for making decisions? How do you make decisions?
35:07 Speaker 05 Well, I take in information a lot. And so I like to be, probably to a fault, be familiar with the facts on the ground. And so I'm very consultative, take in expertise, absorb. So I feel like I have a level of mastery sufficient to then make a decision. That's one part. I'm very inquisitive. I think the strength of good journalists is they know how to ask questions and they're driven by curiosity. As a company, we're driven by curiosity. As an executive, I'm driven by curiosity. I want to figure out how things interact, to understand the nuances. And so that's for my part.
35:49 Speaker 05 I also, at the same time, believe in letting managers manage or creators create and making sure that what I'm doing is to help make those managers or those creators, make them successful. And so depending on where we're focused, if we're focused on something that is important for the whole company, I will be informed and I will make the decision consulting my management team. Within the framework of the strategy that I've outlined and the intricacies of that, I am a firm believer in letting the managers make decisions. And so I have a very flat structure where there is a lot of autonomy to, within that framework, make decisions. Because I think that allows people to move faster, allows the company
36:33 Speaker 05 to move faster, allows us to experiment without going through a central clearinghouse constantly. And so I want, I guess, both. I want, on the one hand, I want to have the expertise, so I'm informed. There's a limit to that because you can't do that when you are thinking about macro issues about everything. And so I have to be judicious in how I do that, where I focus that thirst. And then, on the other hand, having that flat structure and empowering people.
37:03 Speaker 04 We have to take another break. We'll be back in just a minute.
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38:43 Speaker 04 Welcome back. I'm talking to Dow Jones CEO Almar La Tour. Before the break, we were talking about one of the big decoder questions, how he makes decisions. Now, we're going to take that idea and put it into practice, specifically around AI, which has become a major part of Dow Jones' business over the last few years.
39:00 Speaker 04 Let's apply that to AI, that framework. I think it's useful to have a framework where we talk about this next set of big shifts, because that's a lot of decisions. You mentioned Factiva earlier. That's a data platform. You're promising some generative AI tools there. You want to offer more of those tools to your customers across the board. You've made some deals with OpenAI. At the same time, you're suing perplexity. What is the shape of the AI opportunity to you? When you look at it broadly, you're suing perplexity. You think they're taking information away from you without compensating you. You've made a deal with OpenAI at some rate. We can talk about whether that rate is enough. And then you're offering the tools to the users, right?
39:42 Speaker 04 When you look at that whole set of things, the number one question to me is, okay, how big of a business is this really? Because I don't know if anyone's making more money from AI than they're spending on building the tools right now.
39:56 Speaker 05 So we are, I think, at a very, very early stage in that, and so it's hard to say. What I can say is that on the product side, we see some of our products outperform versus what we had planned for them. So we have a product in our risk business called Integrity Check. It's more of a self-serve model where you don't have to wait for Dow Jones to get back to you and do its computation using AI ourselves, but out of the view of the customer. But instead, having a customer do that, some basic research on risk and compliance themselves, sort of assessing who they can do business with and getting that to sort of an 80% reliability from there,
40:41 Speaker 05 then using that as a springboard to say, okay, now, within this, the remaining 20%, I need help from the company. That product is fairly young, and that's performing outside expectations, is outperforming expectations. So on the whole, I think this will be a net positive. But we got to unpack what we're talking about first.
41:03 Speaker 05 We've got to get the foundational elements of this right. If we don't have proprietary information that is truly proprietary, then we're going to lose this game. So you see us engage in building products, building a marketplace with Faktiva and deploying tools internally. But all of that has to happen in tandem with solving that foundational question.
41:26 Speaker 04 So let me ask you, last summer, the deal with OpenAI, the reporting is that it's about $250 million.
41:32 Speaker 05 Is that correct? Read the Wall Street Journal.
41:34 Speaker 04 That's the Wall Street Journal site, so I believe them. I had Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic on the show a few months ago. He told me one of the reasons that he made a deal with OpenAI was to set the market rate, which is useful for fair use litigation, which is useful for other kinds of deals. Do you think 250 million is enough of a rate to set the market?
41:57 Speaker 05 I mean, you've got to ask, I'm not going to talk about specific amounts, but you've got to ask, what is that amount for? And then what I am personally less interested in is a single amount, but more an operating model and a business model for how you do business going forward over a long period of time. How does that operate? Is when information is used, is that the value of that information recognized along the way? And is there a mechanism that helps realizing that valuation?
42:29 Speaker 04 Set the dollars aside, inside of the OpenAI deal, what are the signals you're looking for that indicate whether the deal was a success or a failure?
42:36 Speaker 05 Just simply because of that, because of the way we've set up that deal. I'm not going to talk specifically about that deal. It was a super nice try because I almost bet, but.
42:45 Speaker 04 I'm going to try again.
42:46 Speaker 05 No, I'm sure you will. But more broadly, I can say, so how can you tell that generative AI tools that you're deploying or models that you're deploying within your own business, how are they successful? That's by usage. And is it generating revenue on a consistent basis? Is it just a blurb like, oh, it's a novelty factor and now we move on? We're pretty early in that process, so I don't know yet what's ahead fake, what's real. Some of the products I can tell this is real, right? Some of it is a shift in user experience and in user requirements. And this is going to have to be table stakes. Offer a UX that is built around generative AI because the customer expects that.
43:32 Speaker 05 So you're getting at the trickiness of establishing the value writ large. But overall, I think of generative AI as an accelerant for the strategy that we have. It will allow us to go deeper in our verticals faster and more efficiently. And in ways that we couldn't even imagine. And we've all talked about the wonders of generative AI. But doing research in ways that we couldn't do before, human and otherwise. Within Dow Jones, we talk about authentic intelligence. That's the combination of generative AI and human guidance. And we find that that's a sweet spot for certain B two B products that we're building.
44:15 Speaker 05 So it's accelerating going deeper. It's it will accelerate going wider, i.e. scaling our vertical strategy. Because we can stand up verticals much faster, whether that's a geographic vertical. Because now we can say, all right, we can launch in this language and it's so reliable. And it's a lot cheaper. And then connecting everything is a massive generative AI is a massive accelerant. Because now with a thin layer on top, we can extract data from all these different data.
44:45 Speaker 04 Do the tools work well enough for you to trust it?
44:49 Speaker 05 On a case by case basis, when it's very specific and we are answering a question from a customer. And it's often a co-creation where we are solving a certain problem. And we have very narrow parameters, then I think it works. When you go wide, you get a wide answer. And so our strategy is built around being specific, being focused on verticals. And AI fits nicely with that. And in fact, allows us to go much deeper, be much more specific and be more discerning. And so under each vertical, you can create sub-verticals using a much larger data.
45:26 Speaker 04 You're describing something that happens within Dow Jones, within its products. More broadly, News Corp has been pretty harsh about platforms and work. News Corp CEO Robert Thompson, I think famously is critical of Google. The company was behind the laws in Australia that require platforms to pay publishers for linking. AI represents that opportunity as well, or that challenge as well, right? That instead of using your tools, someone might use a ChatGPT or a Google Gemini or something and just receive an answer. Do you think that these deals you're making, are they hedges against that outcome? Are they investments in that outcome? A lot of publishers, for example, I'll just give the example of sort of the millennial
46:11 Speaker 04 digital media startup boom, were predicated on, we will just be the most viral thing on Facebook and Facebook will pay us that money. And that obviously did not pan out. And I think people are very wary of making that same mistake with AI. But you have one of these deals. So how are you?
46:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, no, but this is why at the very start, I said, I see those deals in a separate category. It's foundational, it's about principles. The money to be made in AI is, it's really on us to make sure.
46:35 Speaker 04 It's on your proprietary tools.
46:36 Speaker 05 It's on us that what our gen AI answer spits out is relevant to our customer in a way that some other provider with maybe a more general offer is not. And so we have to make sure that when we combine our proprietary journalism and our proprietary data and our convening power with generative AI and with LLMs, we have to make sure that what the outcome is to a query is A, reliable, and B, is something that you can't find somewhere else, or B, at the scale of where you can't find it somewhere else within that vertical.
47:19 Speaker 05 So I think there's a distinction between establishing the principles and getting value for that, getting forward value for, if you are being used. But then there is a separate category of efficiency tools that we use in a company, and yet another category where we say, here's where we build products that have to answer a certain question that exists in the market, in any different industry, in our case. And we're going to give a superior answer and you're going to need that answer in order to be more successful than the next person working on solving that problem in a certain industry. So if that's about energy pricing and forecasting energy prices, we want to be the most reliable on that. Or what's happening in the chemical industry?
48:02 Speaker 05 We want to be the leading voice in that. And generative AI should be one way in which you get that out of us, but in a proprietary sense. And so that should be, hopefully, very different than going to any chatbot and asking that same question. And maybe you get an approximation, but it might not be as reliable. But hopefully, there will be sufficient proprietary data in our answer that will make that competition uneven in our advantage. And so that, I think, is the task. And just to, I feel very strongly that we cannot go in
48:42 Speaker 05 to this new era with a view of, well, this is what these companies have to do for us. Like, we have to agree on the principles and the value. But then it's really up to us to create superb products and answers to complex questions in a very complex world to realize the value that these new tools offer. And so both those things have to exist.
49:10 Speaker 04 I've talked to a lot of publishers and media CEOs over the past several years about where the traffic comes from, how the payments work, where the value is going. Setting aside AI for a minute, it feels like the nuclear question everyone is asking is, well, if Google is just indexing our sites and taking the data, eventually, we will have to block Google in a way that many publishers were comfortable using their robots file to block OpenAI and other crawlers. Have you ever considered going that far?
49:41 Speaker 05 Oh, I'm not going to speak specifically to Google. We're a partner and we have lots of things that we do together. There's also things that we disagree on.
49:49 Speaker 04 News Corp, I think famously the most outspoken in this industry. That's why I was comfortable asking the question.
49:54 Speaker 05 No, no, no, absolutely. So this is not on my radar in the way that you express that. But that's the short answer to that. I think, I guess, in taking your question in a different way, we have to emphasize O and O and we have to make sure that being in our world, in our universe, in your individual vertical or in one of our broader products or in the entire Rubik's Cube, you have an experience that you cannot have somewhere else. That's on us. How far do you go in putting a wall around that? We'll see over time.
50:30 Speaker 04 You are in litigation against perplexity. They've taken some data. I think you don't like that. I'm guessing by the fact the lawsuit was filed. If you win that case or the New York Times company wins its case against OpenAI or Sheryl Crow wins her case, that will upend the market as we understand it, right? There will be some new fair use precedent that is created. How does that change how you think about building and deploying your own AI tools?
50:57 Speaker 05 Again, I put this in a separate box. Like, we got to build our.
51:03 Speaker 04 Well, wait, let me challenge you on that for one second, just to get it into the right framework. Right now, it feels like the entire industry is just assuming that win or lose these cases. The money will be sorted out, we'll be able to build at the same rate we've been building, right? OpenAI, well, maybe they'll win or lose. We're gonna, maybe the rates go up and it's just more expensive through what OpenAI is doing because they have to pay all the singer-songwriters in the world. Maybe. It also seems to me that potentially the rates are so high that the entire structure of the industry changes.
51:36 Speaker 05 The industry, in this case, AI.
51:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, industry changes, right? Like, suddenly we have to, the compliance cost of making sure all of our data is licensed before we feed it into the model for training skyrockets because the penalties are high under copyright law. That feels like an underconsidered risk. These lawsuits are just going to play out and something will happen. The way that I think Google was able to roll over the Viacom lawsuit when YouTube started, or the Google Books lawsuit, because they were the sort of the plucky upstart and the value of those tools was so high that they got to win a bunch of lawsuits. I don't think the AI companies feel like plucky upstarts. I don't think that public sentiment is with a bunch of giant tech company billionaires anymore. It feels like those lawsuits might go the other way.
52:19 Speaker 04 And at that point, some of the tools you are using to build with, or some of the partners you have, their cost structures might change so dramatically.
52:27 Speaker 05 That that is going to stop us from.
52:29 Speaker 04 That, yeah, that everyone's strategy has to change. And I'm just wondering how much you are considering that.
52:34 Speaker 05 I see where you're going with it. I think the answer to the individual case is it's a little bit the blind man and the elephant. There are different patches of fair use that different legal cases are pursuing. One case is not gonna, it might reverberate, but it's not going to be necessarily absolute. And so I hate to say this as an answer to any question, but there is a big wait and see. At the moment, I got to go on the assumption that as a technology, generative AI is present in my world, is going to be present even more, is going to be present and an expectation from consumers, whether they're corporate or consumers out in the wild.
53:17 Speaker 05 And so we cannot continue to build and then think at the same time, like, oh, it may all just disappear. And by the way, we might be the culprit because we're applying that, which is, it's an interesting scenario. I don't think it will play out that way, but.
53:33 Speaker 04 But you're one of the litigants. That's what I mean. It's interesting because you are.
53:37 Speaker 05 I don't know that it will be debilitating. I don't think that the commercial agreement that we have with OpenAI, the value of which I can say, but you just cited that, that has obviously not stopped OpenAI from developing. And so I believe in a market mechanism and I think that's where we'll end up, that there will be a gravitation to that, rather than stopping the industry in its tracks.
54:03 Speaker 04 OpenAI famously has not made $1 in profit. That's the thing that I, it's right, they have to build a business that's valuable enough to support deals.
54:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, but Amazon didn't for a long time either.
54:10 Speaker 04 I feel like we've brought up Jeff Bezos in a variety of ways on this episode.
54:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, no.
54:15 Speaker 04 I'm very curious to see how your lawsuit plays out with perplexity and how those businesses develop. I'll have to have you back as that progresses.
54:23 Speaker 05 My pleasure.
54:24 Speaker 04 There's something there that feels, it's almost invisible. You're right. By man and the elephant, it's there. It's very big. And I think this next year, we'll see how it shapes the business. I want to end by talking about press freedom. It's something you care about a lot. You've talked about it a lot. Obviously, you're the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. You famously had Evan Gershkovich detained in Russia in March 2023. You worked very hard across a number of administrations to bring him back. This is a very challenging time for press freedom, both abroad and it feels like in the United States. What's your view of the landscape right now?
54:55 Speaker 05 We're living in a time of tremendous change, of polarization, and that makes covering the news trickier than ever before. It also, I think, increases the value and the contribution that we bring to society as a free press. And so, on the one hand, with all the changes that we're seeing and with all the challenges that we're seeing, including against media, this is a time that any journalist should be made for, right? If your heart is in explaining complexity to the world, there's never been a time when we've had this to grapple with.
55:37 Speaker 05 And so I think, on the one hand, we can offer enormous value. On the other hand, it's become a lot harder to do that. And the statistics around the world don't lie. There are well over 300 people who were killed last year doing journalism. People have been put in prison. And there is a harsh dialogue in society that makes it, under many circumstances, less comfortable to go after a story. Sometimes I measure whether we did a story well by how much I got in terms of complaints from the left and from the right after certain stories. And so the temperature is high.
56:20 Speaker 04 But let me, let me push you on that, too.
56:22 Speaker 05 Yes, please.
56:23 Speaker 04 That is, that's an old chestnut in journalism, right? If everyone's unhappy, you're doing your job right. We're in a place-
56:29 Speaker 05 It's also like my daily existence, honestly. So that is, that is- It's a very young chestnut.
56:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
56:37 Speaker 05 And for me, I mean, it's there every day.
56:40 Speaker 04 But we.
56:41 Speaker 05 But yes, I know where you want to go.
56:42 Speaker 04 This is a pretty asymmetric information landscape right now.
56:45 Speaker 05 Yeah.
56:46 Speaker 04 One side is vastly more willing to lie. One side is vastly more willing to even change the data. The Trump administration is making noise that they'll take government spending out of GDP, which would dramatically change almost everything the Wall Street Journal does, right? Like, at the most fundamental level, we might not be able to trust the government data anymore. That's a threat to press freedom. At the same time, they will spin it as a good thing. Elon Musk is out there trying to spin this as a good thing. You don't see the left playing that kind of game with the data in that way to sort of metaphysically create political outcomes, right? There's not as much trying to tweet things into reality that Elon is doing.
57:25 Speaker 05 So I'm not going to left-right things in this conversation. What I can say is like, how do you respond to an information ecosystem where maybe in an asymmetrical manner?
57:38 Speaker 04 I'm saying how do you respond to an information ecosystem where Donald Trump has threatened to sue pollsters in Iowa that he didn't like the results of their poll? Or where Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, is potentially holding up the CBS Skydance merger.
57:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
57:55 Speaker 04 Over his investigation of 60 Minutes editorial content.
57:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, so it's a very clear answer, I think, to that. It's not an easy answer, but the first answer is stick to your principles. And in our case, we believe in reporting the facts and in the newsroom, we believe in free markets and free people on the opinion side. And you stick to that and you do not let go. All right? And you double down on that. And that's our contribution to the information ecosystem. And we're going to do more of that. And by the way, that's a demand-driven thing as well. But we're talking about press freedom. This is an answer to that. You're not going to change your reporting if you start doing that, if you start making concessions and you're reporting and omitting facts that you know to be true or start self-censoring,
58:43 Speaker 05 then that game is lost.
58:45 Speaker 04 You have.
58:46 Speaker 05 That's one. Okay. The second, you got to keep a cool head. We live in an environment where taunting and provocation is the norm. And so you can take that bait or you cannot. And you have to then, in my view, not be hysterical in response to every little provocation that might exist. And in fact, you might get more respect if you do not respond to every provocation. And then you have to recognize the moments when principles are at stake, when you have to fight or you have to express your disagreement.
59:28 Speaker 05 And so keep on doing what you're doing. Do even more of it, in our case. Reliable, create reliable information. It's gonna be, it's gonna be good for society, it's gonna be good for you as an organization. Keep a cool head and stick to your principles. And that last part is also non-negotiable, non-negotiable. All these three, in fact, non-negotiable. You gotta stick to your principles. If you start shifting and making certain concessions at the wrong, wrong moment, there will be a very high price to pay for that, so.
1:00:02 Speaker 04 You have colleagues in similar positions across the media that are making concessions, right? ABC settled its case with the Trump administration. CBS looks like they might settle the 60 Minutes case because the threat of the Skydance deal being blocked in some way hangs over them. Are you saying you would not make those concessions? Are you saying they should not?
1:00:24 Speaker 05 I'm not saying either one of those because I'm not commenting on their individual situation. I just think that there are moments where, as an organization, you're gonna have to evaluate, and the AP just went through this, is this a moment where I speak out and where I stick to my guns or not? And I think those moments, you better choose carefully, you better have a clear view of your principles and understand what you actually stand for and understand the ramifications because people will point back to certain moments and you wanna make sure that you're on the right side of that.
1:01:00 Speaker 04 No, I'm gonna ask you this more directly because I think I just need to hear it therapeutically, but I think your reporters probably need to hear it too. If the pressure comes to you from the Trump administration, are you saying that you'll fight in a way that it feels like a lot of other big media companies are choosing to cave?
1:01:13 Speaker 05 I think the question is just too loaded in that you make it very specific. I think we have fought for our principles for decades. We have stood up for our reporting for decades. We have a legal team that is incredibly strong, that has fought for press freedom and for our journalism again and again. If we make a mistake, we correct. We own up to that and that is absolutely part of the value structure. We stand up for principles, period.
1:01:48 Speaker 04 What happens if the generative AI makes a mistake?
1:01:50 Speaker 05 Depends on what mistake it is. And so we actually in building and co-creating some of these products that answer very narrow questions, we were sometimes surprised at mistakes that snuck in and we just wanted to make sure that we can't release products without having screened for that, but you're going to have to correct.
1:02:11 Speaker 04 Yeah. Do you think that that information environment where some of the tools are less reliable and some of the institutions are less reliable, or perhaps even openly hostile to the press? Do you think that's something that you will be able to chart as Dow Jones alone? Or do you think that's an industry-wide effort? Because it does not feel like there's a lot of coordination across the industry right now.
1:02:32 Speaker 05 I think the industry should shoulder a lot of this together in a loosely formed coalition or through solidarity. But I'm focused on Dow Jones's success, but I certainly share and on our values, but I certainly share our findings with colleagues all the time. And there is a very active dialogue amongst media leaders that A, I want to foster and B, I participate in. And so if you look at very difficult moments like the Evan case or getting people out of Afghanistan during the rapid withdrawal from US forces there, we worked very, very closely together.
1:03:14 Speaker 05 There's very close contacts among amongst a lot of those leaders. I think that's a healthy thing and I would like to see more of it.
1:03:21 Speaker 04 Well, Almar, you're giving us so much time. Tell us what's next for Dow Jones.
1:03:25 Speaker 05 Well, there's tomorrow's news, so I want you to tune in. And so definitely come to the Wall Street Journal every day. But for us, you'll see us focus on international rebalancing. We're rebalancing our portfolio to make sure that we are as strong outside the borders of the US as we are here, focused on video, focused on deeper data products. But overall, we will continue to be focused on what we have been focused on for the entirety of our existence, and that's providing reliable information.
1:03:56 Speaker 04 Amazing. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.
1:03:58 Speaker 05 Thank you so much for having me.
1:04:02 Speaker 04 I'd like to thank Almar for taking the time to join me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really, anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected] . We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok and an Instagram now. They're both @decoderpod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is production of The Verge, a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox, Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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