All right, don't go anywhere because we now have Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, joining me. Emma, thank you. Appreciate you.
So, if you are not familiar with Emma Tucker, you should be familiar with Emma Tucker. Maybe we should wait. Give everyone a second to come back in the room. Come stay. All right.
If you're not familiar with Emma Tucker, you should because she is a legend in the news industry. Emma is intrepid and fearless, and one of the things that has made her a standout leader of the Wall Street Journal is that Emma has not been afraid to do what is best for the journalism, and often what's best for the journalism is what's best for making sure that you have a unified company that can back the journalism. And so you've made some really interesting calls.
In terms of trust, you are in this interesting position where you need to earn trust amongst your own colleagues, your own cohort, while you're making these calls. What's the number one thing that you're trying to do to make sure that they trust you while you're leading them through this sort of chaotic time?
Oh, that's a... that's... Well, I think it's... I've been very consistent about my messaging to them, which is, so number one, I think something I've done very consciously is talk to my colleagues about the state of our industry. And actually you're very helpful there because you know, you write about the challenges that we're facing as an industry.
So what I'm trying to say to my colleagues is, yes, I know the Journal has always done things a certain way, but our industry is facing a crisis. You may not feel it, but we are. So you need to engage with that as journalists. And then secondly, I've been very consistent about we need to be delivering journalism that is compelling, useful, distinctive, and makes a difference to our readers' lives. It's not enough just for us to do journalism that we like. We always... the reader has to be, or the audience, better put these days, has to be front and foremost of everything we do.
And then I've said to them, if we really, really focus on that and we deliver journalism that is useful, compelling, and that people will come back for, the attributions will follow. And I think after two years banging away at this message and not deviating and being willing to take risks with the stories that we publish, I think I have finally, eventually, some grud— somewhat grudgingly, not always grudgingly, earned their trust because I think they can see that I'm serious about this, you know, distinctive storytelling that I feel we need to do.
Yes, I agree with that as well. In terms of the trust piece, you said taking risks with the stories that you're telling. Sometimes that requires a whole another level of trust with your audience because you might be citing anonymous sources. You might need to be explaining more how you got to that piece of information so that they trust you. Do you feel as though in this era news organizations and the Journal need to be more transparent about how they got to that story than they did before?
Yes, definitely. And I think the more we explain about how we do our journalism, the more our readers will trust us. It was interesting, you know, it used to be that if the Journal spoke, that was all you needed. You know, there was—and we seriously, people would cite to me when I got there, um, 'Well, we don't like to explain what we did. You know, our journalism speaks for itself.' And I think that was true not just of the Journal, but a lot of, you know, established media brands.
But now I feel, look, if we are quoting using anonymous sourcing—and trust me, anonymous sourcing is one of the things that we spend most time agonizing over—but in this news environment, you have to be able to, you know, we will simply not be able to speak to people unless we can guarantee their anonymity. Now, we don't take it lightly. It's only for the most sensitive stories where we sanction anonymous sourcing. And when we do that, we want readers to know and we're willing to explain.
We have things on our website that explain this, that very senior editors know who those sources are and are confident in the legitimacy of those sources. But I think transparency is key. So we do more and more explaining. We get our journalists to talk about how they got stories. I think it's all part of a more conversational relationship that we have now with our readers.
When we think about new things that you need to do to innovate—AI, leveraging influencers—how do you make sure that you can develop trust while trying these new things that a lot of your readers might not necessarily be engaging with themselves? They might not know or be as familiar with every single kind of AI chatbot or technology, but you want to dive in. How does the trust carry over?
Well, I would say that our core values of fairness, objectivity, are so integrated into the newsroom. When we bring in new journalists, including those that we bring in to do some of the more innovative forms of journalism that represent a departure for us, we have very, very strict training protocols. We have to explain to any journalist working at the Wall Street Journal: you are here to tell stories for readers. You are not here to promote your own agendas. Objectivity and trust are key to what we do.
So it's really, really embedded. We do town halls about trust. We talk about trust at every possible opportunity. And I think it's entirely possible for that sort of old-fashioned integrity to underline everything we do, whether it's putting our journalists in front of cameras to give a hot take on something or analysis. We do much more analysis than we used to do. But I think it's possible to be analytical, to have interesting angles on stories, without undermining those core values.
Yes. And analysis, but not opinion.
