“I’m Not Naive”: Inside Emma Tucker’s Rocky Wall Street Journal Reboot

A few weeks ago around lunchtime, more than 100 journalists at The Wall Street Journal staged a walkout, an hour-long protest that culminated outside of editor in chief Emma Tucker’s office. Angered by yet another round of layoffs—the latest of which hit a handful of people on the US News team earlier that day—and fed up with stalled contract negotiations, members of the union decorated Tucker’s glass walls with their discontent. Staffers took turns sticking Post-its, scrawled with messages like “EXPLAIN YOURSELVES” and “The cuts are killing morale,” to the exterior of the office, navigating around Tucker’s executive assistant, who was standing guard in front of the door. “Do you think this is helpful? Are you going to stick them on me?” she asked, scolding staffers for being impolite and eventually, as a sea of fluorescent-colored squares amassed, calling security. The episode was over a few minutes later, with nary a sticky note in sight by the time Tucker, who’d been absent for the whole fiasco, returned to her office.

When I stopped by the Journal a week later, Tucker seemed unfazed by the turmoil. “I would expect morale to be low because if you’re changing things, that’s normal,” she told me. “But I would also dispute that all morale is low,” she added. “The people we’ve promoted—and there have been very many people that we’ve promoted—I don’t think their morale is low.”

Tucker, a personable and somewhat irreverent Brit, took over the Journal in February 2023. In a little over a year, the 57-year-old journalist has brought color, voice, and a renewed metabolism to America’s business newspaper of record. Sure, you’ll still find stories about interest-rate cuts and investment income. But you’ll also find investigations into Elon Musk’s unusual relationships with women at SpaceX and drug use, the succession battle for the luxury empire LVMH, and messages that Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar sent to compatriots and mediators. (An attorney for Musk told WSJ that he’s never failed a drug test at SpaceX.) Tucker’s goal is to make the paper “audience-first” and “to grow and retain subscribers,” she told me. It might not sound like the most visionary mission. But the Journal today is, well, better—a more compelling product that a wider swath of people might pick up and read.

“The problem a lot of people face with the Journal is they don’t think of the Journal as for them—that it’s for a very small subset of people on Wall Street,” one senior Journal editor told me. “She has a broader view of what makes something a Journal story.” Tucker’s approach seems to be working: Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, recently announced record-breaking digital subscription numbers, with digital subscriptions for its properties—which also include Barron’s and MarketWatch—achieving the largest rate of sequential growth to date.

Upon arriving at the paper, Tucker quickly replaced the old guard with her own people, addressed legitimate editing bottlenecks, and pushed for sharper, more ambitious stories. Staff were generally on board, until she started firing a bunch of their colleagues, with the Washington DC bureau hit especially hard. Some are still Tucker fans, seeing her as the kind of change agent necessary to shake up the Journal, a place mired in vestigial structures and traditions. But she’s lost large pockets of the newsroom in the process of “restructuring,” an effort that, to staff, has largely manifested in pushing out well-regarded editors and esteemed reporters. With no end in sight and little consolation or explanation from Tucker, the newsroom is on edge. “From the outside, it feels like she’s moving incredibly quickly, with sort of summary executions,” an editor from a rival news organization told me. “But from the inside, this has been going on for so long that everyone is in a panic because they don’t know the next person who’ll be taken out and shot.”

It’s a culture shock for a newsroom where people tend to stay 10, 20, 30 years, and whose culture is built upon collegiality and institutional knowledge. It is a place particularly averse to change. Under Tucker, Journal staffers are waking up to something that looks more like the UK’s Fleet Street model: take it or leave it, and fuck you if you don’t like it. Reorganizations are a fact of life in British newsrooms; Tucker, who’s never worked at an American newspaper before now, may have underestimated the culture gap.

Over the course of reporting, I spoke with more than two dozen current and former Journal staffers, whose opinions of the paper’s new editor run the gamut from savior to villain. “She’s a bit of a Daenerys Targaryen, where it was all optimistic. She was a hero freeing us from pronouns and attributions. But now we’ve realized she was put here to slash the Journal down to size and turn us into a metrics-obsessed, subscriber-obsessed, churn-reduction factory,” said one current reporter. Said another: “She may be improving the journalism, while seriously hurting the journalists.”

“There’s no point in me setting out a vision and then going, ‘But we’re just going to carry on doing everything we’ve done before,’” Tucker said. “Everyone said when I got here, We’ve got to change, we’ve got to change. But I’m not naive. I know that everyone says that until it affects them, and then they don’t like it so much.”

Staffers in the Journal’s DC bureau had been anticipating cuts for months; in October, bureau chief Paul Beckett was reassigned, allegedly because he refused to implement them. They were not, however, expecting a “red wedding,” as one staffer described the events of February 1, which was when managing editor Liz Harris, Tucker’s No. 2, went down to the nation’s capital to announce a restructuring of the Washington bureau.

News of the layoffs—which had leaked to other outlets in the days prior—came at 9 a.m., when Harris sent an email inviting the bureau to a conference room for a meeting set to last only 10 minutes. There, Harris, flanked by three other suits, read the news of the reorganization from a piece of paper, but staffers struggled to hear over the wail of a nearby motorcade. “Speak up!” they shouted. Harris kept talking over the noise, telling staff that those impacted would “receive an invitation to meet with us individually today.” She didn’t take any questions. Later, staff watched colleagues get up one by one to meet with HR. By the end of the day, at least 30 staffers were gone; some were told they could apply for other positions. People were crying in the newsroom. Tucker and her team were seen as oblivious to what damage they’d caused, and clueless about how they could’ve done this better.

“Any job loss is bad for the people involved. But at the end of the day, the net total of jobs that we closed in DC was 16, and there were over 90 people in that office,” Tucker said. “We created a bunch of new jobs, as well,” she added. “It wasn’t just slash and burn.”