How Dow Jones thrives when news is seen as just another commodity

A couple of weeks ago when my editor Jaime Ho asked if I would like to talk to Mr Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, I leapt at the opportunity.

The Journal, Dow Jones’ flagship product, is a publication I have long admired for the quality and depth of its reporting. Its exposes such as on the Theranos fraud, the downfall of World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, and the Epstein files, have been unsparing. Indeed, it is currently defending a multibillion-dollar lawsuit by US President Donald Trump over its unfavourable reporting of his connections to the late financier – Mr Trump has maintained he had no improper dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. 

It was also an opportunity for me to convey to the very top of the Journal’s mast the concerns I have had about the Editorial and Opinion stances the publication has taken on the Iran war, which I consider too gung-ho and pro-war. I suspect I am scarcely alone.

That said, as long as its Opinion offerings are distinct from news, and does not influence the reporting, I would say the Journal is entitled to its opinions. Indeed, in sharing sessions with junior colleagues I often stress the importance of journalists acting as “agents of our readers” and a favourite example involves the Journal and my former employer, Bloomberg – today’s industry leader in financial data and information. 

Founder Michael Bloomberg has spoken of how, in 1988, his then-fledgling company got a boost from the Journal’s front-page, above-the-fold story extolling the Bloomberg terminal’s merits over Telerate. Guess what? Telerate was owned by Dow Jones.

That’s why I am not surprised that the Journal has emerged as America’s No. 1 newspaper by circulation, according to some industry publications. The digital version has another 4.2 million subscriptions, making for a total of 4.61 million subscriptions. Sister publication Barrons Group brings in another 1.47 million subscriptions.

At a time when famed masts such as The Washington Post are wilting, and news is frequently mentioned as a commodity, how are the Journal and its siblings thriving?

By standing against that tidal wave of information with verified, high-quality reporting, data and analytics, says Mr Latour. 

Dow Jones, itself part of the Murdoch-owned News Corp, and whose other offerings include Barrons, MarketWatch and Dow Jones Factiva, reported fiscal 2025 earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation of US$588 million (S$756 million) on revenue of US$2.3 billion. 

Industry insiders attribute much of the success of this subscription-based model – as distinct from the traditional advertising-led one – to 55-year-old Mr Latour, who came to the job in May 2020, after managing WSJ.com and serving as the Journal’s executive editor. 

The Dutch-born executive, who started his career as a news assistant in Washington DC and was an intern for the Wall Street Journal Europe, has reported from Brussels, London, Stockholm, New York and Hong Kong, where, he says, he picked up the East Asian penchant for sipping warm water over the course of the work day.

Now a corporate bigwig, his steering of Dow Jones to its best performance ever in its 142-year history marks a successful personal career transition from “church” to “state” as it were.

News veterans who like to think they preach from lofty pulpits might regard that move to corporate by fond colleagues – in SPH Media’s case, such transitions were made by former ST editor Leslie Fong and editor-in-chief Patrick Daniel – with a measure of concern bordering on sympathy. Who would want to spend his work day worrying about advertising and circulation numbers and ensuring salaries were paid on time, when you could be planning the next big story package, or directing coverage of a big news break.

“The passion for reporting, for data and for technology was at the root of what I did as a journalist and at the root of what I am doing as a business leader,” he responds. “As a journalist, you are always asking what is the real story and that is what I am doing right now as a leader of the business and in Dow Jones’ case, an institution. 

“It is of profound importance to be curious about the changes that are happening (and what they mean) for the world, for your business, for your clients and customers, and your personnel. In technology companies, it is not unusual for leaders to emerge from the product side.”

Now that he had so many corporate imperatives to consider, had he lost newsroom friends as a result?

If he had, he was yet to be made aware of it, Mr Latour jests back. In fact, soon after he got off the plane in Singapore, he’d gone off to have dinner with a former news colleague.

“Life after all is about relationships and I think that is even more important in the age of AI – human intelligence, and human relationships make such a tremendous difference.”

The startling sweep of AI, or artificial intelligence, is of course the topic du jour in any conversation. Mr Latour says AI permeates “every part” of Dow Jones. 

From a business-to-business perspective it is about building new products and delivering them – a risk product called Integrity Check, for instance, uses AI to generate structured, fully sourced diligence reports – and it also is about improving work efficiency everywhere.

But even more fundamental to the company’s interests is to ensure that intellectual property accumulated over more than a century does not get eaten for free by companies promoting their large language models.

“We have a strategy around that – we want to build commercial relationships with the platforms that want to use our data, and we have with some. However, if you use our information unlawfully we will take that to its natural consequence.”

In May 2024, News Corp signed a content-licensing agreement with OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. Dow Jones Factiva, which is a huge database that includes news and media monitoring, has a ‘‘connector” to ChatGPT that was launched just a few weeks ago. 

When he used to be CEO of The New York Times, Mr Mark Thompson, the former BBC top man who is credited for the Times’ own remarkable surge in online subscriptions, once told me that Mr Trump’s first term had been a godsend for the media because of his outsize personality and ability to generate an endless stream of publicity. Was the Journal benefiting, similarly? 

Mr Latour places the hunger for news in a broader context.

“What is unique about the era that we’re in is that we are seeing more changes than several generations before us have,” he says. “There are many forces driving that and we are not just narrating that but charting that territory, and trying to help people decipher that. It goes well beyond a single administration. It goes well beyond a single politician to the rules of the game fundamentally changing.” 

And regardless of how the news is consumed, he sees his task as ensuring that the information put out by the company is not merely “unassailable… not just facts, (but) intelligence”.

I asked how news companies were reacting to the Trump administration’s moves to control the narrative, if necessary by compulsion. The President, for instance, has tweeted approvingly of Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr’s threats to cancel the broadcast licences of news companies that present unfavourable coverage of the Iran war.

While he will not speak for other news organisations, the Journal’s own reporting is “independent, and well equipped for these times”, says Mr Latour.

Dow Jones is working to a strategy broadly described as wanting to be present in the forces that shape the world. Right now, it sees those forces as energy, geopolitics and global risk. And as for my observation that the Journal seems to have lately throttled back on its Asia coverage, he assured me that if I were to look at the arc of what the company was doing in the region “you will see net growth. That to me is not just an aspiration, but a requirement”.

Sound strategy and appropriate technology are, of course, critical for survival and growth. In the news business though, making information easy to digest also is key. Bloomberg calls it presenting financial information “in a style that a dope can understand and a professional can appreciate”. 

A quarter century ago, over dinner at a Boat Quay restaurant, I asked the visiting Henry Grunwald, legendary former editor-in-chief of Time Inc and once my top boss, what he thought about the then-fashionable mantra in Western media of “dumbing it down” for the audience. 

Mr Grunwald’s dry riposte was that he’d rather try to lift the reader up than descend too low.

“I love anyone who invests time in reading and informing themselves,” he says. “And I want to make sure that good information is accessible for anyone at any level. It cannot be the domain of a few. And it also cannot be oversimplified.”