Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
The so-called media apocalypse that started off 2024 was, economically speaking, not an event that lived up to its biblical proportions. Yes, thousands of journalists across the country lost their jobs at outlets like the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and across Condé Nast, in large part due to the decline in ad money funding newsrooms’ budgets. There were spectacular implosions at The Messenger and Sports Illustrated, too — both best read as cautionary tales of owners and executives making bad decisions. But the news industry has mostly moved on. The Olympics and the wild election season have created a news bonanza, and OpenAI has been cutting deals to pay media companies for access to their content. The layoffs in recent months, with some exceptions, have been smaller. Even BuzzFeed, which has stooped to financial engineering to keep its stock from getting delisted, has managed to pull off not-terrible deals for some of its most popular sites.
On Friday came more good news, this time from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The company’s flagship Dow Jones division, which owns The Wall Street Journal, now has 5.8 million subscribers — up from 5.2 million at the end of 2023. The Journal itself saw an 11 percent rise in digital subscriptions and now has 4.25 million print and online subscribers. That business is making so much money now that Dow Jones is bigger, by revenue, than News Corp’s separate news-media division, which includes the Sun, the New York Post, and other Murdoch-owned papers.
Of course, the Journal did not get to this point quickly or easily. The 135-year-old paper is in its second year under editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, who has cut jobs across bureaus and faced walkouts and angry Post-it notes from reporters upset by the sudden loss of their colleagues. It has still not been able to verify a disputed story about extensive ties between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Palestine and Hamas, according to Semafor. Nonetheless, the Tucker era has been marked by a broader approach to business news, targeting an audience beyond the bankers and investors who typically made up its core readership, my colleague Charlotte Klein reported for Vanity Fair. That shows up in deeply reported stories on Iran, manipulation on TikTok, and charmingly quirky coverage of the Olympics — and that’s just this week.
The Journal has more advantages to draw on than many of its competitor organizations. The newsroom has a deep well of talent, and the company has the resources to pursue the most ambitious of scoops and investigations. The company also has a more expensive, and lucrative, data package for business clients, which drove more of Dow Jones’s growth, according to the earnings report. And any profits from News Corp’s deal with OpenAI — which the Journal reported “could be worth more than $250 million” by 2029 — are not readily apparent from the quarterly report.
Earlier this year, Dow Jones’s CEO, Almar Latour, gave Axios a view into its strategy for this year. “We’re not going to be a lifestyle company. We’re not going to be a gaming company. We’re not going to be a cooking company,” he said. “We are going to instead focus on how we can help people make decisions.” (This is, presumably, a reference to the professional services.) This, of course, was a thinly veiled jab at the the New York Times (which also owns The Athletic, a cooking app, and games like Wordle).
These are, essentially, two completely divergent strategies for the future of media. Dow Jones appears to see news as a part of a broader data stream that helps people do their jobs, while the Times sells it as a key part of its readers’ off-duty lives. But zoom out, and it’s not like the Journal is taking away from the Times’ readership. This week, the Gray Lady reported it added 300,000 subscribers just in the last quarter, after it brought on 210,000 during the first three months of the year. Together, that’s more than 1.1 million new subscribers just to Dow Jones and the Times this year — and that’s before the election season really got weird this July.
Clearly, both models work. As both companies grow, they will likely be able to negotiate better ad rates, which can then fund more of their operations and, in turn, allow them to expand even further. This isn’t quite the best news for the media industry, as it favors only the largest incumbents, but it also shows that there are still millions of readers out there who want to pay for news. The postapocalyptic scene might not be such a bad place — at least, least for some news outlets.
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