Today, I’m talking with Almar Latour, who is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of its parent company Dow Jones, which you can think of as a huge research and data provider for companies of all sizes. Dow Jones itself is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. 

Latour 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 everything 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. In addition to competing with the flood of free content on various social and streaming platforms, the industry is also facing new challenges like fights about copyright and AI and battles with the Trump administration, which has been pushing hard to shut down critical reporting and limit press freedom.

Latour has insight into all of that: On the news side, he’s made a big content-use deal with OpenAI while also suing Perplexity for training without permission. On the other side, he’s pushing to build his own AI data products for Dow Jones customers. 

He is a fierce defender of press freedom who fought to have Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich released from Russia after being imprisoned for more than a year. But at the same time, he works at News Corp, whose chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has deep ties to President Donald Trump and who has overseen a vastly polarized and politicized era of news media.

So I asked Latour about all of that and really pushed him on a few of his answers — even 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, Latour was game and he hung in there, but you’ll hear him congratulate me for almost getting him to slip up. I did my best; I think many of you will have thoughts about it.

Okay: Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Almar Latour, you are CEO of Dow Jones and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Welcome to Decoder.

Great to be here. Thank you.

I have a lot to talk about with you. There’s an entire set of complicated AI questions that might be existential for the media industry, but you’re heavily invested in building some of that technology and some of those services, which I think is interesting. 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. 

But it happens that I have you on the day after the news, so I want to start with the news. Just last night, The Wall Street Journal, of which Dow Jones is the publisher, restructured how it covers tech and media. That involved cutting about 10 or 15 editors and reporters. Obviously, I’m very interested in how you structure a newsroom to cover tech. Why make that decision? Why get smaller?

First, this is a newsroom decision, so this is squarely in the terrain of [editor-in-chief] Emma Tucker, who’s a new editor, relatively speaking. She’s in year two, moving into year three. Emma was hired with a remit of helping to increase engagement with our existing readers, to expand our readership, and to maintain and enhance the quality of our coverage. She has set out over the past two years 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 that distinctive journalism is what makes the difference. It’s about knowing the interesting story, the story behind the story, and to have exclusive journalism and insights. 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.

So what happened yesterday was a continuation of that. Generally, when you look at the changes that she’s brought in — I’m not speaking specifically about the San Francisco bureau but tech —  it’s been new talent. She has an antenna for what she thinks works there. And one of the areas where that’s been very pronounced in recent months is in Washington, D.C. That has gone through several cycles of changes.

She’s brought in new people, and that has had consequences. The marching orders are slightly different when there is a closer connection to the center of the newsroom, where the decisions about news can be made in the context of a broader 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 Emma’s specific plans. 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. But overall, what Emma has focused on, and what the Journal and Dow Jones are focusing on, is going deeper and having more exclusivity, more “proprietary content.” Moments like yesterday are absolutely never easy.

I think I see a thesis of Dow Jones as a company, and we’ll get to the big picture in a second here. The idea is you’re going to give a bunch of people in the business world an information edge, whether it’s with the Dow Jones Information Services, 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. 

I’m just looking at this broadly. I’m looking at Dow Jones as part of News Corp. I’m looking at News Corp’s financials from last month. Revenue at Dow Jones is up to $600 million. That’s up 3 percent. Your earnings are up 7 percent to $174 million. But the cuts are in tech, which is dominating the world. I’m just wondering about that resource allocation because that’s the role of the publisher.

Well, it is in the sense that the newsroom has a budget, and we support quality journalism. Frankly, we are so successful at this moment as a company that all of our investments are in enhancing the quality of our journalism, data, analytics, etc. Getting better news, getting better information is the mission, and we are investing in that.

So, I just want to correct one simplification that sometimes comes to the surface at moments like this. I don’t think you intended to do that, but I think it’s important to make a distinction. It’s super hard when you go through what happened yesterday and many other 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 an overall climate inside our company. You see our earnings, revenue, and subscription base growing.

We will invest wherever there’s a good business case to be made. Tech and the cross section of tech with policy, politics, global trade, and society is one of the top priorities for Dow Jones, and one of the 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. Tech will permeate everything — it is permeating everything right now. Look at Washington, D.C. or at the announcements from President Emmanuel Macron in France. So, don’t take the snapshot, that is where I was headed. This is a moment in time. We can talk again in a year, and our tech coverage should be broader, deeper and probably have a larger following.

I run a tech publication —  what is nominally a tech publication — and we are heavily invested in covering policy. One of the lines we’ve always used, a cliche even, is that, “The Verge can cover everything because everything is now a tech story.”

That was a way 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 as, “Okay, maybe all of The Wall Street Journal is about tech in that way?” Is that getting more expansive for you?

There is a current of tech that runs through every story at The Wall Street Journal. It runs through everything at Dow Jones in two ways: as a story and as technology. There’s not a part of The Wall Street Journal or Dow Jones where tech does not feature. Having people cover tech in isolation is one way of covering this. In addition, tech is a core part of many other beats and areas that we cover. Tech is a horizontal and a vertical at the same time.

We’ll come back to the AI deals you’ve struck. I want to talk about them expansively. Just in this context, like so many publishers, you’ve struck a deal with OpenAI and other AI companies. Are those providing enough revenue for you to invest against in the newsroom, or are you still in wait-and-see mode with those deals?

I don’t think we should tether our investments in AI to any individual AI deal. That’s not how I look at it. 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.

Or the newsroom.

AI in the newsroom or in the newsroom [itself]. We have our investment priorities, and we’re following a game plan that we’ve been following for a while. It 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, our data, and our analytics by growing wider. 

We do this  by adding new areas of expertise. Just last week, we announced our agreement to acquire Oxford Analytica. Going deep into geopolitics is an addition. But in future investments, once it’s a part of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, we will probably invest in going deeper into that area of geopolitics. 

Then, the third wave is by connecting everything that we have. There should be easier access to the data that underlies everything at Dow Jones and everything that we do at The Wall Street Journal.

Now, to your question, 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. Sometimes there’s a temptation to be in austerity mode and to just take away in order to eke out a profit. That’s not us, and that’s not how we’re growing whatsoever.

I think it’s more than a temptation for most media businesses right now. That is the reality of the situation, right? It costs more to make the information than most people can return on it.

Yeah, but if your answer to that time and time again is, “Okay, I’ll cut in order to make ends meet,” then 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 or where you’re focused. That, to me, was never an acceptable method to grow or create great journalism. I understand that sometimes you have your back against the wall as a company in any industry. You may have to cut in order to make ends meet, but that’s not a strategy.

People get that wrong. I think you’re absolutely right. That might be a prevailing tendency, but I don’t think it should be. The prevailing focus should be about making 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? 

People in the past used to say, “You’re a subscription business. You’re The Wall Street Journal. 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 the value of a lot of different types of information. It doesn’t just have to be about business. So, I actually think there’s a lot of opportunity in shifting from this austerity mode to creation and building mode. Easier said than done, and sometimes, you have to step away from things that just aren’t working.

I think that recognition of value is very challenging. I understand why it happens in the business community. I even understand why it happens for us in the tech press because it’s often tradable. You can pay a high rate to The Wall Street Journal if you are a Wall Street trader, an investor, or some other kind of business professional because the information has a clear value that you can use to trade upon to make a deal or an investment, to buy or sell a stock.

I think that information is not tradeable for the average consumer. They just open TikTok. Maybe there’s some influencer reading The Wall Street Journal to them for free. That elimination of scarcity, I think, has been the fundamental challenge. It was the challenge when we went to social media, the challenge when we went to 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 completely eliminate even the scarcity of having to click. They’re just going to tell you what the models have read on the internet. Do you perceive that as existential a challenge as some of your peers in the media do?

I think you’re absolutely right in that the bar on being distinctive with the content, news, or information that you create has gone way up. So, you have to be more discerning where you focus. You ask about the existential threat around AI, and that goes back to the recognition of value. I want to make sure that the industry — certainly Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, and all of our publications — don’t fall into a trap that is similar to two decades ago when all information had to be free, people took scraps from search engines,. and then found out over time that they’ve effectively lost, that we seeded that market. So, that’s why we are investing time and resources right now into making sure that large players in the AI space recognize that value.

Our push is to make sure that there is a commercial agreement around that. And I think that is the preferred outcome in many cases on both sides of that fence. Where we can’t reach a commercial agreement, where there are fundamental differences of opinion, we are prepared, in some cases, to say, “Then we’ll fight it out in court.” So, we’ve walked both paths, with a preference for the first. 

I’m still answering your question as to what’s existential here and is there an existential threat. You spun it forward and we can get through that, what it means for the end user and how consumers respond to that. But I think first, we have to get the starting blocks. These are the companies that are providing generative AI, UX, and new interactions for consumers. They have gotten to that point by using information. We need an acknowledgement that the information that has value, certainly our information, and that if you want to use that information on an ongoing basis, that some of your generative AI-produced content answers to queries are current and reliable. You’ll have to pay us for access if you value that. 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. We have to get that part right. We’re in the middle of that, or maybe we’re at the first part of that still.

I’m going to ask you one more very existential philosophical question, and I need to get back to having you explain the company — 

Yeah. All my favorite topics.

There’s that line, that 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 that come to them on social media. The social media companies are all giving up on fact checks. Various billionaires say whatever they want on podcasts with no pushback. And what you are providing is a very expensive source of truth, or hopefully what I am providing is an affordable source of truth. That’s a big discrepancy, right?

I would say we’re as affordable as a cup of coffee a day. Everyone drinks coffee. I think it’s a myth that access to reliable information is unaffordable. 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’s a choice to be made.

I understand why people would buy The Wall Street Journal or some of Dow Jones’ products, which we should come to. But that’s the bigger picture, right? It’s convincing the next consumer that they should pay for information as opposed to picking a filter bubble on social media. Whether that’s AI, social media, or if it’s just algorithms, that seems like the challenge the media faces.

The challenge is to 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, technology, policy, or whether it’s hyperlocal 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. I might want to invest a small amount of money into understanding what’s happening in my community. There’s some examples of that popping up.

In response to this huge question that you’re asking, I think we’ll see innovation in journalism and a lot of creativity — already and in years to come — where, undeniably, there’s this flood of information of mixed quality.There’s also, undeniably, a 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 asking, “Hey, tell me what this means.” 

We see this in our data. We see this when there are moments of friction in society, in business, or in geopolitics with any market. We see a spike and people coming to us for free, but we also see a spike in subscriptions. Demand for reliable information, I think, has gone up as the pool of unreliable or uncertain information has grown. Some of it might be reliable, some of it might not be.

I think you cast that as an existential risk. I can cast that as an opportunity. I like to be aware of the existential risk and take the precautions there, but mainly focus on the opportunity and meeting that demand. I don’t think we have met that demand by any stretch. I think there’s a huge opportunity for us and for other publications in lying ahead to meet that demand. I think that demand will actually only grow.

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 Decoder listeners also probably know about Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, which is the parent company of The Wall Street Journal. Describe how all of that fits together in your role as CEO of Dow Jones.

In its most simplified form, I think of Dow Jones as a Rubik’s Cube, and inside is all of our premium journalism, exclusives, or explanations 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 with 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 or maybe I want the whole thing, but that’s fundamentally a way of thinking about how we operate and how, ultimately, we’re organized. AI is actually helping a great deal with this and it’s accelerating with generative AI. AI and automation has been with Dow Jones for a long, long time.

Let’s then make that a little bit more complex. If one of those tiles is about bond trading, I ought to be able to get all information: premium information and live information, but also analytics and forecasting to help me in my job. We’ll get to AI in a moment, but the cards I was dealt when I took over almost five years ago as CEO was to look at Dow Jones as a platform of verticals. 

You’ve got business news, which is both a horizontal and a vertical, but that’s The Wall Street Journal, as you say. It needs no huge explanation there. There’s wealth and investing, where we have Barron’s, MarketWatch, Financial News, which is a title in the U.K., and 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 since added an energy arm and within that, commodities and petrochemicals. We’ve added a leadership arm, organically, looking at what it takes to be a modern leader. 

Each of these verticals, if you will, is successful when it does four things. You have to have leading news in that particular vertical, in that particular area of concentration. So pick your industry. 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 buy, and we’ve done that. If you have those two things, you can do proper analytics. AI helps with that to some degree. If you sell products that can do forecasting and analytics, that’s where the value keeps going up. Then, the fourth factor is convening power — that is bringing people in that industry, in that sector, in that vertical together.

If you have those four, you actually get a mini-network effect inside that industry. We’ve seen that happen, and it happened by design. We’ve executed this with our manager, Joel Lange, who runs our risk and compliance business. If you have all those four parts, then you see the leaders in that industry come together. Take risk and compliance. You see compliance officers coming together and our [Chief Compliance Officer Council] at Davos and in other places. So, now you have thought leaders there.

Well, the procurement officers who buy our data products see, “Oh, yeah, the people that are leading my department or 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 observation and anecdotal or whether that actually translates into business. Often it translates into business. That has the same effect on our analytical products.

Then if you add news to that risk vertical — we have mentioned internally that we will have a risk journal —  you will have risk industry folks, compliance officers and the like, tap into that news product to actually start their workday and understand what’s happening. Now, we are present in your workflow in that industry end to end. By the way, since we’re The Wall Street Journal, we’re probably also still with you in another way when you go home.

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 The Wall Street Journal newsroom really matters. More exclusives and more distinctive journalism helps with the news obviously. 

We’ve built, bought, and created more proprietary data. We’ve spent well in excess of $1 billion 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. Then,there’s convening power. I think for a long time, the media sort of misread that as just events, but it’s something far bigger than that. I think it’s a subscription business.It’s a recurring revenue business, it 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.

When we have all four parts, 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, so we’re going deeper there. And it’s a scalable model for the future because we now understand how to build these verticals. Either we can mine The Wall Street Journal for new verticals because we see what people gravitate to and where we have the expertise, and then build on that. 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. Let’s 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. So we’re making sure that these magnificent data pools are going to be available. 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 it.

You’re describing Dow Jones as something that makes really high-quality, rigorous information across newspapers, magazines, and data products and that sits within News Corp. How often do you hang out with [Founder] Rupert Murdoch?

I wouldn’t put it in the category of hanging out whatsoever. There’s healthy, friendly interaction. He’s chairman emeritus, he’s built the caricature on the side. He’s built enormous media success stories over time. And so, from a business point of view, there was a lot to learn from him, certainly in my early days, like, “How do you create businesses?” But from News Corp, there’s been nothing but support for our growth story.

So I’m very thankful for that. It’s Rupert, it’s [Chair] Lachlan [Murdoch],  and also [CEO] Robert Thompson, that’s a whole apparatus. But we also have access to capital as Dow Jones. Five years ago, we hadn’t done an acquisition for well over a decade. Now we’ve done billions in acquisitions. That support is a vote of confidence for the direction that we’re taking, for the strategy that I outlined to you: growing deeper, growing wider, connecting things. There’s also a deep respect for the independence of The Wall Street Journal and the value that comes with that. I’ve seen that consistently applied. So yeah, that’s my answer to your hangout question.

Rupert Murdoch plays on both sides of the information crisis. You can watch his other properties create whatever reality is politically expedient for Donald Trump. And then I 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.

Oh no, the opinion pages don’t just say tariffs are bad. Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau said in a press conference — 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.” Something along those lines. We don’t hold back. Our opinion pages don’t hold back, and their assessment is based on well-established principles of free markets and free people. The independence to make that judgment is core to who we are. For my part, I’m focused on the Dow Jones part, of making sure that sings.

But do you see that contradiction? Do you think your team sees 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?

Listen, I can’t comment because of the shared ownership structure. I’m not going to comment on my colleagues at Fox. We had protesters outside in Fox Square, and people are protesting while the reporters at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones are doing their jobs. So, there is an awareness of the perception of Fox and what we’re focused on. I think there’s also a great awareness amongst our staff, and has been for over 15 years, that those two things are separate — without specifically commenting on how you characterize that, because I am just not going to get into that.

That makes sense. I want to ask the last Decoder question, and I want to end by talking about AI at length. You’ve had to make a lot of decisions. You’ve changed the way the company works a lot. You obviously have a way of thinking about the company that’s very specific. Although I will say that Rubik’s Cubes are meant to be solved. I think you want them to remix the cube, not solve it. But what’s your framework there? How do you make decisions?

I take in information a lot. I like to be, probably to a fault, familiar with the facts on the ground, so I am very consultative, take in expertise, and absorb. So, I feel like I have a sufficient level of mastery to then make a decision. So that’s one part. I’m very inquisitive. The strength of good journalists is that 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. That’s for my part.

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 successful. It depends 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 by 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. So, I have a very flat structure where there is a lot of autonomy to, within that framework, make decisions. I think that allows people to move faster and allows the company to move faster. It allows us to experiment without going through a central clearinghouse constantly. So, I want both. On the one hand, I want the expertise so I’m informed. There’s a limit to that because you can’t do that when you are thinking about everything’s macro issues. I have to be judicious in how I do that, where I focus that thirst. On the other hand, we have that flat structure and empower people.

Let’s apply that framework to AI. I think it’s useful to have the 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, but at the same time, you’re suing Perplexity.

You think it’s taking information away without compensating you. You 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. What is the shape of the AI opportunity to you? When you look at that whole set, the number one question to me is, “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.

We are in a very, very early stage in that, so it’s hard to say. What I can say is that on the product side, some of our products outperform versus what we had planned for them. 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. Instead, we’re having the customer do some basic research on risk and compliance themselves, assessing who they can do business with, and getting that to an 80 percent reliability. From there, they use that as a springboard to say, “Now, with the remaining 20 percent, I need help from the company.” 

That product is fairly young, and that’s outperforming expectations. On the whole, I think this will be a net positive, but we’ve got to unpack what we’re talking about first. 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. You see us engage in building products, building a marketplace with Factiva, and deploying tools internally, but all of that has to happen in tandem with solving that foundational question.

Last summer, the deal with OpenAI, the reporting was that it’s worth about $250 million. Is that correct?

Read The Wall Street Journal.

That’s The Wall Street Journal’s side, so I believe them. I had Nicholas 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 and for other kinds of deals. Do you think $250 million is enough of a rate to set the market?

I’m not going to talk about specific amounts, but you’ve got to ask what the amount is for. What I am personally less interested in is a single amount and more in an operating model and a business model for how you do business over a long period of time. How does that operate? When information is used, is the value of that information recognized along the way, and is there a mechanism that helps in realizing that valuation?

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?

Simply because of the way we’ve set up that deal. I’m not going to talk specifically about it. That was a super nice try because I almost bit. 

I’m going to try it again, don’t worry.

I’m sure you will. I can talk more broadly. How can you tell the generative AI tools that you’re deploying or the models that you’re deploying within your own business are successful? That’s by usage. Is it generating revenue on a consistent basis? Is it just a blurb? Like, ” 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 a head fake and what’s real. Some of the products, I can tell, are real. Some of it requires a shift in user experience and user requirements. This is going to have to be table stakes, like offering a UX that is built around generative AI because the customer expects that. 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. We’ve all talked about the wonders of generative AI, in 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. We find that that’s a sweet spot for certain B2B products that we’re building.

It’s accelerating, going deeper. It will accelerate going wider, i.e., scaling our vertical strategy because we can stand up verticals much faster. If it’s a geographic vertical, we can now say, “All right, we can launch in this language, and it’s so reliable and it’s a lot cheaper.” And then connecting everything, generative AI is a massive accelerant because now with a thin layer on top, we can extract data from all these different data pools.

Do the tools work well enough for you to trust it?

On a case-by-case basis, when it’s very specific and we are answering a question from a customer. If it’s 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. So, our strategy is built around being specific and being focused on verticals. AI fits nicely with that, and in fact, it allows us to go much deeper, be much more specific, and be more discerning. Under each vertical, you can create sub-verticals using a much larger data pool.

You’re describing something that happens within Dow Jones and its products. More broadly, News Corp has been pretty harsh about platforms and work. News Corp CEO Robert Thompson is famously critical of Google because 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. Instead of using your tools, someone might use a ChatGPT or a Google Gemini, and just receive an answer. Do you think that these deals you’re making are hedges against that outcome? Are they investments in that outcome? 

I’ll just give the example of the millennial digital media startup boom, which was predicated on “we will just be the most viral thing on Facebook, and Facebook will pay us that money.” That obviously did not pan out. I think people are very wary of making that same mistake with AI. But you have one of these deals.

This is why I said at the very start that I see those deals in a separate category. It’s foundational, it’s about principles. The money to be made in AI, it’s really on us to make sure–

So it’s on your proprietary tools?

It’s on us that what our generative AI spits out is relevant to our customer in a way that some other provider with maybe a more general offer is not. We have to make sure that when we combine our proprietary journalism, our proprietary data, and our convening power with generative AI and LLMs, that the outcome to a query is A, reliable, and B, something that you can’t find somewhere else or be at the scale of where you can find it somewhere else within that vertical. I think there’s a distinction between establishing the principles and getting value for that, getting forward value if you are being used. Then, there is a separate category of efficiency tools that we use in the company.

Yet, there’s 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 industry.” 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 forecasting energy prices, we want to be the most reliable on that. We want to be the leading voice on what’s happening in the chemical industry, and generative AI should be one way in which you get that out of us, but in a proprietary sense. 

That should be, hopefully, very different from going to any chatbot and asking that same question. Maybe you get an approximation, but it might not be as reliable. Hopefully, there’ll be sufficient proprietary data in our answer that will make that competition uneven to our advantage. That I think is the task. I feel very strongly that we cannot go into this new era with a view of, “Well, this is what these companies have to do for us.” 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. Both those things have to exist.

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 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.txt file to block OpenAI and other crawlers. Have you ever considered going that far?

I’m not going to speak specifically to Google. We’re partners and we have lots of things that we do together. There’s also things that we disagree on.

News Corp has famously been the most outspoken on this. That’s why I was comfortable asking the question.

Absolutely. This is not on my radar in the way that you express that, but that’s the short answer to that. Taking your question in a different way, we have to emphasize owned-and-operated. We have to make sure that being in our world — in our universe, in an individual vertical, 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? It’s about putting a wall around that. Yeah, we’ll see over time.

You are in litigation against Perplexity. It’s taken some data. I’m guessing by the fact that the lawsuit was filed, you didn’t like that. If you win that case, The New York Times Company wins its case against OpenAI, or, I don’t know, Sheryl Crow wins her case, that will upend the market as we understand it. 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?

Again, I put this in a separate box. We’ve got to build our–

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 in these cases, the money will be sorted out and labeled to build at the same rate we’ve been building.  Maybe the rates go up, and it’s just more expensive to do what OpenAI is doing because it has to pay all the singer-songwriters in the world. It also seems to me that potentially, the rates are so high that the entire structure of the industry changes.

The industry, in this case, is AI.

The AI industry changes. Suddenly, 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 under-considered 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 was because it was sort of the plucky upstart. The value of those tools was so high that it 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. 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–

That that is going to stop us from that development.

That everyone’s strategy has to change. I’m just wondering how much you’re considering that.

I see where you’re going with it. It’s a little bit of the blind man and the elephant. There are different patches of fair use that different legal cases are pursuing. One case might reverberate, but it’s not going to necessarily be absolute. I hate to say this as an answer to any question, but it’s a big wait and see. 

At the moment, I have to go on the assumption that as a technology, generative AI is present in my world, is going to be present even more, and is going to be an expectation from consumers, whether they’re corporate or consumers out in the wild. So, we cannot continue to build and then think at the same time about how 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 you’re one of the litigants. That’s what I mean. It’s interesting. 

But I don’t know that it will be debilitating. I don’t think that the commercial agreement we have with OpenAI — with the value of which I can’t say but you cited — has stopped it from developing. I believe in a market mechanism, and I think that’s where we will end up, that there will be a gravitation to that rather than stopping the industry in its tracks.

OpenAI famously has not made $1 in profit. It has to build a business that’s valuable enough to support these deals. 

Yeah, but Amazon didn’t for a long time either.

I feel like we’ve brought up Jeff Bezos in a variety of ways on this episode. [Laughs] I’m very curious to see how your lawsuit plays out with Perplexity and how those businesses develop. We’ll have to have you back as that progresses. There’s something there that feels almost invisible. You’re right, the blind 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. You’re a 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?

We live 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. With all the changes and challenges that we’re seeing, including against the media, this is a time that any journalist should be made for. If your heart is in explaining complexity to the world, then there’s never been a time when we’ve had this to grapple with.

On the one hand, we can offer enormous value, and on the other hand, it’s become a lot harder to do that. The statistics around the world don’t lie. There are well over 300 people who were killed last year doing journalism, and people being put in prison. 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 the right after certain stories. So, the temperature is high.

Let me push you on that too. That’s an old chestnut in journalism, right? If everyone’s unhappy, you’re doing your job right.

It’s also my daily existence, honestly. So, it’s a very young chestnut for me. It’s there every day, but yes, I know where you want to go.

This is a pretty asymmetric information landscape right now. 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 it’ll take government spending out of GDP, which would dramatically change almost everything The Wall Street Journal does, right? 

At the most fundamental level, we might not be able to trust government data anymore. That’s a threat to press freedom, and it 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 to metaphysically create political outcomes. There’s not as much trying to tweet things into reality that Elon is doing.

I’m not going to left-right things in this conversation. What I can say is how you respond to an information ecosystem, or maybe in an asymmetrical manner —

I’m saying, how do you respond to an information ecosystem where Donald Trump has threatened to sue pollsters in Iowa because 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 over his investigation of 60 Minutes’ editorial content?

There’s a very clear answer to that. It’s not an easy answer, but the first answer is stick to your principles. In our case, we believe in reporting the facts in the newsroom. We believe in free markets and free people on the opinion side. You stick to that and you do not let go. And you double down on that. That’s our contribution to the information ecosystem, and we’re going to do more of that. 

That’s a demand-driven thing as well, but we’re talking about press freedom. This is an answer to that. If you start making concessions in your reporting and omitting facts that you know to be true or start self-censoring, then that game is lost.

Second, you’ve got to keep a cool head. We live in an environment where taunting and provocation is the norm. You can take that bait or you cannot. Then, you have to then, in my view, not be hysterical in response to every little provocation that might exist. In fact, you might get more respect if you do not respond to every provocation.

Then, you have to recognize the moments when principles are at stake, when you have to fight or express your disagreement. So, keep on doing what you’re doing. Do even more of it, in our case. Create reliable information. It’s going to be good for society, it’s going to be good for you as an organization. Keep a cool head and stick to your principles.

That last part is also non-negotiable. All these three, in fact, are non-negotiable. You’ve got to stick to your principles. If you start shifting and making certain concessions at the wrong moment, there will be a very high price to pay for that.

You have colleagues in similar positions across the media that are making concessions. ABC settled its case with the Trump administration. Looks like CBS might settle the 60 Minutes case because the threat of the Skydance deal being blocked hangs over it in some way. Are you saying you would not make those concessions? Are you saying they should not?

I am not saying either one of those because I’m not commenting on their individual situations. I just think that there are moments where, as an organization, you’re going to have to evaluate. The AP just went through this. Is this a moment where I speak out and where I stick to my guns or not? I think in those moments, you better choose carefully. You better have a clear view of your principles, understand what you actually stand for, and understand the ramifications. People will point back to certain moments, and you want to make sure that you were on the right side.

I’m going to 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 when it feels like a lot of other big media companies are choosing to cave?

The question is just to load it in and make it very specific. 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 it. We own up to that. That is absolutely part of the value structure. We stand up for principles, period.

What happens if the generative AI makes a mistake?

It depends on what mistake it is. Actually, in building and co-creating some of these products that answer very narrow questions, we were sometimes surprised at mistakes that snuck in. We want to make sure we don’t release products without having screened for that. But you’re going to have to correct.

Do you think that an information environment where some of the tools and the institutions are less reliable, or perhaps even openly hostile to the press, is something 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.

I think the industry should shoulder a lot of this together in a loosely formed coalition or through solidarity. I’m focused on Dow Jones’ success, but I certainly share our findings with colleagues all the time, and there’s a very active dialogue amongst media leaders that A, I want to foster and B, I want to participate in. If you look at very difficult moments like the Evan case or getting people out of Afghanistan during the U.S. forces’ rapid withdrawal, we worked very, very closely together. There’s very close contacts among a lot of those leaders. I think that’s a healthy thing, and I would like to see more of it.

Almar, you’ve given us so much time. Tell us what’s next for Dow Jones.

Well, it’s tomorrow’s news, so I want you to tune in. Definitely come to The Wall Street Journal every day. 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 U.S. as we are here. We’re focused on video, focused on deeper data products. 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.

Amazing. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

Thank you so much for having me.

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