In 2020, Dow Jones — owner of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Factiva, MarketWatch, and Dow Jones Newswires — noticed a significant shift when it stopped trying to produce too much content and began focusing more deeply on what it offered its audiences.

As of the third quarter of fiscal year 2025, it had 6.1 million paid subscriptions, Almar Latour, Dow Jones CEO, told attendees during the first day of the INMA World Congress of News Media in New York. 

Audience strategy

“We have made a very deliberate choice: Do not go wide but go in,” Latour said. “We try to create what we call a full stack, have the leading premier news on a certain focus area. If you combine those two, you get analytics of forecasting, the incredibly important group news stream for us, and add networking to that. So you combine news, data, analytics, and networking, and you get a virtuous circle.”

In an interview with Jodie Hopperton, INMA Product and Tech Initiative lead, Latour said to succeed in this era of fragmentation, a media company must be clear about what it truly stands for. He emphasised that paying too much attention to a media outlet’s brands can risk losing focus on what matters: news, data, and networking.

“The Wall Street Journal brand is rising,” he said. “The Dow Jones brand is more consistently applied. Now, our situation is looking different than most, and we have so many different products that we’re trying to make sure that we make the most of all the assets that we have.”

The CEO acknowledged that changes in Google’s algorithms affected The Wall Street Journal; in 2024 they observed that smaller media outlets attracted larger audiences, which was unusual.

“For us, we saw an impact on some of our largest titles,” he said. “For a long time, we believed that an overdependence on search leads to bad behaviour and ultimately a dependency that is not sustainable.”

Using AI at Dow Jones

Latour said he hopes the recent agreement between Dow Jones and OpenAI will allow the company to reach new audiences, as more and more people are using the tool to search for information.

“If you go to classic search, you are greeted by AI as well,” he said. “And so that shift is taking place, and as we’ve all indicated, it’s changing by the moment, but you ignore it at your own risk.”

Meanwhile, Latour said he remains in an exploratory phase with AI, aiming to better understand how the technology is evolving and how both employees and consumers might be using it. He noted his team recently tested the tool by posing highly specific questions related to a marketing study, and the results were comparable to those produced by a consulting firm.

At Dow Jones, the AI team continues to focus on automation and generative AI, bringing together experts in linguistics, computer science, and other disciplines.

“We now scan customer feedback in new ways that will also lead to setting up customer service and other parts of the business very differently than before,” Latour said. “I think it’s so incredibly important to understand what our customers are saying.”

The battle for press freedom 

Latour spoke about how The Wall Street Journal defends the press freedom of its reporters following the 16-year espionage sentence in Russia against one of its journalists, Evan Gershkovich, 32, who was ultimately released as part of a prisoner exchange.

The CEO said they strengthened their legal team and worked with a private firm that helped them develop a legal strategy, because today’s investigative reporters face new challenges — such as online harassment and other attacks that affect them mentally.

“So if you need someone specific, you can flex up for that,” he said. “I think we have to be careful not to fall into either  through an expression of the legal budget or just in other ways to be insinuating, which is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, that we’re preparing for all these negative things that are happening.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .