The Rebooting Show Brian Morrissey

Emma Tucker was named the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal (and Dow Jones Newswires) in early 2023. She was brought in with a mandate to shake up the Journal in a media market that Emma describes as changed “beyond recognition.” The Journal itself has its own challenges: an aging subscriber base that’s pushing 60, a stodgy internal culture and often convoluted editing process that’s exacting yet hard to square in the current realities of publishing. Like other publishers (and companies), it also has a restive workforce.

Emma and I discuss the changes she’s instituted since joining, from the small bore like doing away with honorifics (RIP, messrs) and putting a cat on a front page to the more substantial changes in top personnel and overhauling the WSJ’s DC bureau. Her moves even led to a New York piece that wondered, “Who is going to get Tucked next?” (Her deputy is apparently known as an “angel of death,” which is a catchy LinkedIn endorsement.)

Some key takeaways from our conversation:

Transitioning from a “print ethos.” Print still gives publications heft, and I suspect that will become more valuable in a world filled with synthetic content, much of it utter crap. But that role is more of being a “shop window,” Emma told me the Journal needs a “definitive move away from print” to serving digital audiences rather than seeing the newspaper as a central distribution channel.

Adopting an audience-first mindset. It sounds obvious, but the challenge for many publishers is adopting audience-first strategies rather than trying to be all things to all people (and all algorithms). That was the main takeaway from a content review Emma commissioned soon after taking on the top role. Those exercises are usually preludes to organizational change. The main theme highlighted in the review: being an “audience-first publication for people that mean business.” Translation: more investigative pieces, less filler content, more “constructive journalism” that serves audience needs instead of winning Twitter/X.

Engagement is the new uniques. The traffic era of publishing has ended. Nobody brags about their ComScore uniques anymore; engagement is the new North Star. That’s particularly true in subscription models, which are natural outgrowths of audience-first strategies. With subscriptions, churn is the boogeyman. I found it telling Emma didn’t cite traffic numbers but highlighted that the Journal had decreased churn by 6% in the past year. The Journal has a newsroom dashboard that measures KPIs like guest visits, conversion rates, female readership, and young readership. 

Other topics we discussed:


Why American journalists are prone to navel gazing


Balancing the need to attract younger readers without alienating the old codgers


How to prepare for the “seismic changes” of AI


The need to focus on what makes you irreplaceable

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU, discusses the diminished state of the industry, promising nonprofit models and new funding models that subsidize public service journalism since the economic foundations supporting it have crumbled, and The New York Times has strayed farther into progressivism since Trump’s ride down that escalator.



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I’m joined by Matt Cronin, founding partner at House of Kaizen, which works with publishers and other companies with recurring revenue businesses to align their business goals with audience needs through customer experience frameworks. Some highlights of our conversation:


Shift to audience-centric approaches: There's a significant shift towards understanding and directly engaging audiences rather than relying on platforms for traffic, which involves a fundamental transition to being audience-centric. A key part of that: Realizing an audience is not a monolith but different groups with different needs.


The importance of intentional audiences: Publishing became a (big) numbers game. That’s changed, as every publisher now much compete for “intentional audiences.” These are people  you have a real tie to, who subscribe to a newsletter, follow a podcast, visit your site directly. This is what Business Insider is after with its shift to focus on “digital go-getters.”


Looking beyond efficiency with AI: Synthetic content is about to overwhelm the internet. Many publishers are focused now on the efficiency gains of AI, as all businesses are and need to be, but stopping there is a mistake. AI needs to be harnessed to – you guessed it – provide added value to audiences.

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to writer John McDermott about his recent expose of self-help guru Jay Shetty and what it says about the chaotic Information Space. We delve into the paradox of influencer culture, where authenticity is a currency, even if the influencers themselves are as flawed as the general population. There’s often a blurry line between fake-it-’til-you-make-it and fraud.

Stephanie Kaplan Lewis founded Her Campus in 2009 with Annie Wang, and Windsor Western as college undergraduates. They saw a need for college women to have a publication made for them by other college women.

Her Campus has grown since then as a profitable, growing media business with 85 employees. Stephanie says Her Campus expanded revenue by 50% last year – and did it with an entirely ad-focused business model. Stephanie credits the growth in large part to building a long-term business that works in any environment rather than a specific environment, such as the easy-money era that’s now in the rear-view mirror.

The twist is that Her Campus is part agency, part publisher, with campaigns leaning on experiential and influencer marketing. This is a path many publishing models will go, as the economics of relying on putting ads on webpages or newsletters grow more difficult. Stephanie and I discuss:

The forced discipline of a bootstrapped model. Her Campus has been profitable for all 15 years of its existence. Imagine.

Not aging up with the audience. Her Campus turns its audience over by design, as it stays focused on college women. When it started, Her Campus was for millennials, and now it’s for Gen Z. 

Being part agency, part publisher. Her Campus ends up with other media companies as customers. 

Doing the basics well. In the media business, strategy is overrated. Execution tends to play a bigger role in separating winners and losers. That means doing the boring things well: Setting achievable sales goals and hitting them, excelling at client service, collecting receivables and such.

Matt Cronin is a  founding partner at House of Kaizen, a consultancy that works with publishers and other companies on recurring revenue growth.

House of Kaizen, which is a sponsoring partner of The Rebooting, uses research-backed experiments to foster audience-first engagement. This allows clients to turn total reader revenue into cumulative gains.

We discuss how publishers can become truly audience centric, what publishers can learn from other consumer companies and more