Wall Street Journal CEO Almar Latour has made a year of industry turmoil a banner success

Almar Latour already had more than a full plate as publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of its parent Dow Jones when his phone rang while he was on a business trip in South Africa in March 2023. The Journal’s newsroom had been unable to reach Russia correspondent Evan Gershkovich for days and feared, correctly as it turned out, that he had been arrested and taken hostage.

Thus landed another enveloping challenge for Latour — how to bring the organization’s full resources to bear to free Gershkovich.

Eighteen months later, he and Dow Jones can claim success in keeping business percolating and getting their hostage back.

The company closed its fiscal year at the end of June with revenue and profits up, advertising losses moderate and paid digital subscriptions continuing to grow fast.

Gershkovich was freed in a complex hostage exchange deal on Aug. 1 after a concerted diplomatic and advocacy push.

Neither accomplishment was anything close to a solo act, Latour told me in an interview in early September. However, Dow Jones’ results under his watch can clearly be traced to his four-year focus on building up its other financial businesses alongside the flagship Journal.

“Loud” advocacy was quickly identified as a main strategy for getting Russia to free Gershkovich, Latour has said. He and editor-in-chief Emma Tucker provided a relentless drumbeat from the bully pulpit of their news organization. They even bought a “Let’s Bring Evan Home” billboard in Times Square on the one-year anniversary of his capture.

In addition, Latour told me, he took charge of behind-the-scenes “private diplomacy” in tandem with the official negotiations of the federal government, which focuses its work through a special office of federal affairs. That proved crucial in a long push for the key precondition for the deal: Germany reluctantly agreeing to release a convicted assassin from a long prison term to a hero’s welcome back in Russia.

The sequence of dual successes left me wanting to find out more about Latour. Top business officers tend not to be especially well-known in the journalism community. (Quick, who’s the CEO of The New York Times?) Though by no means inaccessible — he gives speeches and, selectively, interviews — Latour seemed to me flying particularly low beneath the radar.

I wondered about his back story, and it’s an interesting one: He grew up in the Netherlands, came to the U.S. after high school for “a gap year that turned into 30 years,” started as a news assistant at the Journal and worked up the editorial ranks before pivoting to the top levels of the business side.

As to the financial aspect of his job, Latour has delivered results that are sure to please his bosses at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. His program to get more value from Dow Jones’ less well-known business-to-business subsidiaries has always been a top priority. He came to the CEO position after also upping the game of consumer titles Barron’s and MarketWatch. That provided a running start.

“Not to the exclusion of The Wall Street Journal at all,” he told me, “but Dow Jones is a platform with expertise in many areas.” He saw the potential for growth and for knitting the individual offerings together in a way that would appeal to the company’s core business audience.

Looking at the ventures one by one, Latour said, “You could see where we were doing well and where there was room to fill in the blanks.” That focus has continued to the present.

“We can grow in three ways,” Latour continued: “Go deeper in an area, add new areas, or across the board meld the services into a bundle.”

In September, to take one instance, the company announced that a comparatively small executive leadership training service would expand in a big way. Risk management — the somewhat arcane business function of evaluating threats including political instability — and energy have been other fast-growing performers. Some Dow Jones clients might want all three.

In our interview and others, Latour said that Dow Jones’s value proposition to readers is deeply researched news and data that helps them in a practical way with business decisions, and with personal finance and career decisions, as well.

He prefers a growth strategy adding to the appeal of offerings to a core business audience, including those who are younger, rather than making a play for a new set of general readers.

Talking to the British media outlet Press Gazette early this year, he said the Dow Jones publications look for “strategic” news story choices while steering away from ones that are merely “opportunistic.”

I asked him to elaborate. “We want to be there for people in business and build that relationship. … We don’t want to focus on empty calories that will evaporate. … Everything we do relates to that. … We have to fight for it every day.”

Latour has taken the occasional shot at The New York Times for elevating its softer cooking and games verticals to engines for growth (neither to be found in the Journal). But he seemed to be referring to what he called “political fashion,” as well.

“Opportunism,” he continued, “in part is giving in to a broad political sentiment. … That can be a temptation to get more traction, more eyeballs short term. … We would prefer to be more above the fray, even-keeled every day.”

If the Journal is sometimes out of step in limiting its slams at Trump, so be it. Latour referred me to a stern memo a month ago from editor Tucker to her staff.

Headlined “A note on impartiality,” it said, among other things, “It’s important for every member of the newsroom to remember that the Journal’s reputation for fair and balanced coverage rests on all of us. The reporting we produce on every topic needs to be consistently impartial, demonstrating that we have taken an open-minded and unbiased approach to gathering facts and telling stories. That applies to the language we choose, our framing of stories and the voices and perspectives we include, and is equally important in all of our visual storytelling. Balance in our work also applies to the subjects we choose to cover. I encourage you to challenge your own assumptions and those of your sources.”

That’s not to say the Journal ducks political stories that may be devastating to one side or the other — provided they are well enough reported and written. Examples include a particularly strong on-the-ground piece on what’s really happening in Springfield, Ohio, and an early tough take on President Joe Biden’s mental lapses.

Sticking to the standard of what’s most essential and reliable also helps explain why Latour and Tucker took unpopular action in the first half of the year, abruptly cutting staffing in the Washington and regional bureaus. Many of those slots were reassigned to topic beats like finance and economics or national affairs they consider higher impact for the target audience.

It is not possible to tell from Securities and Exchange Commission filings how the Journal is doing financially. The Journal is just one part of Dow Jones, which in turn is just one part of its parent News Corp. — which also includes British newspapers, Australian broadcast and newspapers, and the New York Post (but not Fox News).

The company instead selectively reveals information about the Journal and Dow Jones. What I saw suggests revenue growth and profitability — in sharp contrast to The Washington Post’s self-reported $77 million loss. Advertising revenues were down, but only 2% across the Dow Jones portfolio.

As with nearly every paper, print circulation is on a fast slide. The Journal, according to its latest Alliance of Audited Media report, had roughly 525,000 daily subscribers as of the end of March. That was a decline of about 6% from the previous six-month period — but it remains by far the largest American daily, with weekday circulation double the New York Times’.

The Gershovich drama played out over 16 months after he was seized by Russian authorities in late March 2023 and charged in early April. Latour told me, as he had other interviewers, that Russia’s intentions were clear from the start. The arrest had nothing much to do with the trumped-up charges and everything to do with Russian President Vladimir Putin taking a hostage to get back valued operatives being held in Western countries.

“Maybe at first, your instinct is, ‘Let’s address this in the quiet,’” Latour told Politico earlier this year, but that was not in the cards because the detention was open news from the start. Plus, the earlier arrest of basketball star Brittney Griner and her eventual release showed that “putting a spotlight on it helps.”

Hence the decision to advocate, with outrage, loudly and often. Almost as quickly, Latour told me, it also was determined that alongside the government’s work on the case, “private diplomacy was an important part of how a situation like this gets resolved.” It made sense for him and Dow Jones to take charge.

Private diplomacy meant, for instance, retaining the top lawyers who dealt with hostage exchanges, Latour said. Conversations with Gershkovich’s parents also showed him that they would be capable of advocating effectively for their son in many settings.

“We went to see decisionmakers (with them),“ he said. The point was to get leaders to go beyond Cold War drama and “understand the personal stakes.”

There were many stops on the family’s extended tour. Most stunningly, as related in the Journal’s own lengthy story of how Gershkovich was freed, Latour took Evan’s mother, Ella Milman, to an elite reception at a gala of the Atlantic Council, of which he is a board member.

She identified German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, waited until he had finished a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then buttonholed Scholz, asking for any help he could provide to free her son. Scholz said he was already aware of the situation and trying, but then he left quickly.

That was one of many such encounters the private diplomacy effort engineered. Milman was the Journal’s guest at the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner, where she stood in a photo line for Biden and made her case.

Latour also took both parents to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a magnet for the highest-level movers and shakers, where they spoke. He escorted them on calls to members of Congress.

In addition, Latour told me, “A few of us went to Germany, keenly aware that the German government would play a part” in any resolution. And that turned out to be the key event in finally getting a hostage swap for Gershkovich — overcoming German resistance to returning notorious convicted assassin Vladimir Krasikov to Russia.

Many of the negotiations, including those of a special White House office for hostage affairs, could be described as secret. At the same time, Latour and Tucker were at times surprisingly open, even while the drama was unfolding, talking in public settings about strategies and how hostage swaps work.

At a European conference early this year, Tucker explained that Russia won’t do an exchange until there is a trial and conviction. So Gershkovich’s secret sham trial in late June, while officially deplored in media reports, could be read by those in the know as a constructive prelude to a resolution.

Finally, there may have been an element of luck in timing. Biden’s candidacy, post-debate, was collapsing through July. Lame duck status was sure to follow quickly after his withdrawal July 20.

As a long profile in the New York Times Magazine related, Biden had been involved personally in meetings on the hostage negotiations right along. Looking for a big win, he called in a favor from the prime minister of Slovenia, Robert Golub, to clear the path for the release of Russian prisoners in that country.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base with family the night of Aug. 1 to greet Gershkovich as he touched back down on U.S. soil.

I asked Latour for a short version of the story of how he went from growing up in the Netherlands to becoming CEO of Dow Jones.

Like many journalists, he got the bug early.

“I always had a passion for news,” he said. “As a teenager in Holland, I wrote for the local paper, riding around town on my bicycle, gathering news.”

His communications chief, Ashok Sinha, tells me he still frequently bicycles to work in midtown Manhattan and works in an open-plan space.

“I also was fascinated by the United States,” Latour said. Arranging for a year after high school, he ended up going to college here and staying.

Nothing about the way Latour speaks indicates that he is talking in a second language. But being OK in that language was not good enough for his plans. “I had to learn to write and communicate in English (at a journalist’s professional level).”

Looking back, he continued, a particularly fortunate experience was a summer internship at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. The institution offers a nine-week summer cultural program with 100,000 participants and big-name figures as presenters. “At a young age, I got comfortable connecting with talented and influential people.”

After an internship in Brussels, he joined the Journal as a news assistant and never left (he is in his early 50s). As a reporter and writer, he was prolific, frequently landing stories on the front page. After some years of that, Latour said, he became attracted to editing — “helping others conceive stories. … It was a force multiplier.”

Switching to business in 2016 and starting at a high level “was the ultimate force multiplier. You have a grip on resource allocation, moving the chess pieces around. I had a view of how that could be done best.”

Since well before Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal in 2008, its tradition has been to choose accomplished journalists for the top job. (The exception was former finance executive Rich Zannino. He advised the Bancroft family, who controlled voting stock, that an infusion of investment was needed and it was a good time to sell to Murdoch.)

Murdoch has expressed preference for British and Australian journalists who he considers faster and bolder than their U.S. counterparts. That way of operating has led to trouble for Latour’s predecessor, Will Lewis, now running The Washington Post, whose critics say he was enmeshed in the Murdoch empire’s phone hacking scandal 15 years ago.

Editor Tucker comes from British papers, succeeding American Matt Murray, Lewis’s executive editor at the Journal and now at the Post. Several of Murray’s predecessors were British or Australian.

Latour does not deliver journalism with a British accent, but he has benefited from having one foot in U.S. culture and another in Europe. A number, but not all, of his postings as reporter, then editor, then publisher, have been abroad, where the Journal and other Dow Jones businesses have a big presence. The CEO job calls for a lot of globe-trotting.

As for management style, Latour said that he loves water cooler chats and loves sharing story ideas with reporters and editors. But he adds a qualifier: “We want to give them their independence (in deciding which to pursue).”

I see an intellectual perspective and a good deal of formality in how Latour handles the core of the job. Both editor Tucker and opinion editor Paul Gigot report to him. However, he never attends story conferences or editorial board deliberations, his communications team said. He was not at the table this summer as the company negotiated a contract with its 1,600-member union of Dow Jones editorial employees, union president Jodi Green told me, but no doubt the negotiators reported the development to him.

In the last sentence of our interview, Latour seemed to meld his executive and writing skills, saving me the trouble of writing my own kicker.

“We only judge ourselves by results,” he said. “It’s pretty intense around here.”