Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour on AI Disruption, Media Trust and the Value of Information

0:00Almar Latour: To me, leadership is about service. And I think the best managers live in service of the people that are their colleagues and the people that, you know, on paper work for them. The WSJ Leadership Institute presents Leaders. I'm Alan Murray. We're going to do something unusual today. I'm going to interview my boss, Almar Latour, who's the CEO of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and has created a real media powerhouse, as recent financial results demonstrate. He's a native of the Netherlands, began his career at the Journal in 1995 as a news assistant, steadily rose through the ranks as a foreign correspondent, technology reporter, executive editor, before taking the top CEO job in May 2020.

0:48Today, he's navigating the complexities of generative AI, digital subscriptions, and he advocates for global press freedom. Here's Almar Latour right after this break. If you're an RIA or looking to become one, Schwab Advisor Services is the Watson to your homes. Smart. Dependable. Always has your back. It's no mystery why they're the number one choice for RIAs who want to be the ultimate solution for their clients. With all the wealth services, technology, and support your firm needs, the difference is so obvious, it's Schwabvious. Follow the clues at schwabvious.com. Trust is a critical asset in today's business world, and it's especially important if you're in the news business.

1:36My guest today is one of the top CEOs in that business. He's the chief executive of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. And he happens to be the man who signs my paycheck, Almar Latour. Almar, thanks for doing this.

1:50Almar Latour: Well, thanks for letting me sign your paycheck. I actually no longer sign it. I think it's a digital process these days. You get all the credit. Well, thanks so much. You work hard for it, I think. Anyone who watches the vodcast knows that. Well, thank you. We have a long history together. I'll try not to use any inside knowledge during the course of this interview. Well, I think I encourage you to use everything you've got. Okay, great. I'm free to go then. Thanks so much. Where I want to start, though, is, as you know, I was at the Wall Street Journal for a long time. I left 14 years ago. When I left, this was a struggling business.

2:34The disruption of the internet had made it hard for all newspaper-based businesses to survive. And when I came back two years ago, thank you very much for that, it was a very different place. You look at your latest earnings, you have 28 % EBITDA margins, you had a record quarter, strong growth.

2:57Almar Latour: What happened? What happened in between? Well, one, I think around the time that you left, a little bit before that, we got new ownership, which meant at that time that with these new owners, News Corp in this case, we could take a long-term view of the business. And that makes a tremendous difference at a time of great change. How far is your horizon? And is there ownership support to actually look that far ahead and make the changes that are necessary? For that, you need a long breath. And at a time of great change, and since then, right, this is how many years ago, Alan? It was 14 years. 14 years ago.

3:42Almar Latour: So during that, we've gone from print to digital, from digital to mobile, from mobile to social, and social now into AI, AI going into agentic. So we've seen many, many, many different changes, shockwaves each of them for many industries, including for media, and perhaps especially so for news. And news prior to that, as you know, the business that you and I grew up in as reporters and editors was fairly static. It was really about the content. So I think the privilege of having this long-term outlook, the long-term support, is a defining foundational difference. So dig into that a little bit.

4:26What did you do with that privilege? Because there are lots of newspapers that did not use that time well. I mean, many of them are out of business. Many of them are still struggling. I mean, very few of them, maybe none of them, are in the financial position that Dow Jones is in right now.

4:43Almar Latour: So how did you use your luxury of time? OK. I mean, we stand on the shoulders of giants. And so there is a DNA to this company and also to News Corp that is heavily invested in quality news, that's heavily invested in treating this as a business and not as a hobby, which is, I think, relevant when you look around the media landscape now. In addition to the long-term outlook, there was a sense of entrepreneurialism that is pretty rare, I would say, at large companies, but that was injected into the company and people were empowered to embrace that. Myself being a beneficiary of that, I think you being a beneficiary of that.

5:31Almar Latour: At that time, I recall, you did many new things. You brought video to the Wall Street Journal. You brought a C-suite council to Dow Jones 14 years later. Here we are still building on that. And so new ideas were encouraged, not discouraged. Big, big difference. And so over the past 14 years, we've taken many steps forward and also hit a number of big, big issues along the way. So what really has happened is that we could embrace new ideas with confidence. So that is, I would say, the conceptual difference over the past 40 years. We can dig into the specific things that we have done. The first one I will open up on, which is right at the moment of that takeover, there was a big decision.

6:27Almar Latour: Are we free or are we paid for? And not only did we decide, and at the time Rupert Murdoch decided, that we should be paid for, we should actually cost even more. And so that was a big divergent path. And maybe the only newspaper that did that. I used to get condolences on, like, okay, well, it's just so sad that this is happening to your business. And also people saying, well, you can only do that because you're a business publication. And so that's not for us. And now, of course, look at the entire industry. Whoever still stands has embraced that. Well, and it was a huge critical decision. And other newspaper companies are still, or news companies are still struggling to do what you understood from the beginning, or what this company understood from the beginning.

7:14What a company, for sure.

7:16Almar Latour: I want to give credit. But let's talk about you, because you've made some important additions to that in the last few years. You've certainly invested in the risk and compliance business, which is growing very strongly. You made an investment in geopolitics. You made an investment in energy. What were you trying to do with those investments? Well, again, I go back to the concept that matters first, that is the driving principle behind this, which was a conviction that we could serve our customers better if we would give deeper information on topics that we care about. So the notion being that our information gets used in different ways by different people at different times.

8:05Almar Latour: Another way to put this is we are a company of verticals. We reimagine the company as a group of verticals that specialize in different topics and offer within those verticals what we call the Dow Jones stack. At the core, news within that vertical, within that area of specialty. Data, preferably proprietary data that is relevant to that vertical. If you have those two combined, you can actually create forecasting and analytics. And then to top that off, you want to have convening power, bringing people together in that. If you have those four factors, news, data, analytics, and convening power, you get a network effect of sorts.

8:54Almar Latour: You get people in an industry talking about your information, in this case, your data, your analysis, at different entry points. at the top throughout the workday. So very simply put, we wanted to make sure that people wake up with Dow Jones news, see it multiple times a day, and then go to sleep with it again at the end of the day. So we're there for you. Another way to put it is we want to power the business world. But is it with those verticals, with the energy vertical, the geopolitics vertical, Is it wrong now to think about Dow Jones as a news company? News is that the foundation will always be.

9:37Almar Latour: There's a flag out here that says News Corp. So it is not exclusive to... We're not exclusively about news anymore. We build on top of that data. We build on top of that analytics. And the majority of our profitability at the moment is derived from data and analytics. And so we are seeing a shift by having opened our aperture to the needs of customers. Yes, they want news, but they also want derivatives of news. And by the way, those other things have higher margins. They have higher margins because they have different utility. But meanwhile, news itself is also undergoing a big transformation as to what utility it delivers.

10:22Almar Latour: It's the moment of news delivery that, of course, the end consumer reads. But it's also feeding into AI. I'm sure we'll get to that because that has also transformed the value of news itself. Well, let's go to it now since you raised it. You have this full stack, as you call it. You have news. You have data. You have analytics convening. How does AI transform that stack? So AI is an accelerant for a business. And here is why it accelerates. So with verticals, we're going deeper. We are also expanding the number of verticals, going wider, if you will. So adding risk, adding energy, adding other verticals down the road.

11:07Almar Latour: And we're connecting things. Everything that we have has to be connected in the form of data because it produces better results for the end customer. If I am interested in supply chain, I want to have energy information. I want to have risk information. I want to have geopolitical information. And I want to have the latest news. And so all those things have come together. And so that's the mentality shift that already exists at the company. Enter AI, and it accelerates all of that. It actually facilitates the going deeper, the going wider, and the connecting things. It helps you go deeper. You can retrieve more information faster.

11:48Almar Latour: It helps you go wider. I can stand up using data. I can stand up new verticals much more easily using AI, using our own expertise, synthesizing from different sources, and connecting things. It brings together everything that we do and can sort it and build it and be used in new and different ways. So in that sense, it's an absolute accelerator. But the question I think it also raises with a lot of people, I mean, we lived through this in the internet age. The news business broadly lived through this. The most important thing is to maintain a direct relationship with your customer. Is there any danger that AI disrupts that relationship, that people get into the habit of getting their information from chatbots?

12:36And yeah, maybe that chatbot is drawing off of you. But if you lose the direct link to your customer, you lose a lot of leverage in the marketplace.

12:44Almar Latour: Well, that disintermediation has happened multiple times over the past decade plus within news media, within other industries as well. And there is, of course, that risk that exists. risks, but if you approach it with an awareness that this has happened before, if you are aware of those risks, you can very much navigate that. And so for us, we have to accept that there's going to be a new type of interaction from the end customer, and they're going to put new demands on us. If we're just going to sit there with our arms crossed and say, well, AI is a danger, we're not going to be able to accommodate these new UX habits and requirements that corporate customers put on us, corporate systems put on us, but also the consumer eventually will put on us.

13:39Almar Latour: If you look at how the growth of interaction with chatbots has evolved over the past few years, I mean, those are staggering numbers, right? And so, one, you have to lean into any new technology in order to understand it, dangers and all. You have to understand it. You have to, in that sense, embrace it. Go ahead. The but. But how do you prevent complete disintermediation? Two, you have to understand the balance of power. And you have to understand your own value. If you do not understand the value of information, you're going to lose this game. This is what went wrong in media before where people thought, okay, it can be free.

14:23Almar Latour: The internet has to be free. So we are free on the internet. Not the Wall Street Journal, not Dow Jones, but a lot of other companies decided, yeah, why charge? Because after all, customers demanded this to be free. So that, I would say, is a grotesque unawareness of the value of information. Here, too, AI is an accelerant. It accelerates, in fact, and magnifies the value of certain types of information. And you need to understand that now we go from one value allocated to a piece of information to the value of information depending on the context in which it's used, by whom it's used, which scenario it's used, at what time it's used.

15:04Almar Latour: And so there is a wide spectrum of value that just opened up for news, for data, for analytics. And we are sitting right in the middle of that. And so you have to be aware that what we're sitting on is not something with diminishing value. It's something that actually has just exploded in value. And you're going to have to go through that prize discovery. You have to understand what does it mean when a hedge fund uses our information versus when a student uses our information. And what does it mean for them to do that right when a big move happens on the market and where latency matters or when you're doing it in the evening because you're doing research as an analyst.

15:54Almar Latour: Those are all different scenarios. So it's careful experimentation. It's beyond experimentation. So the experimentation, I think, is early on. You have to establish that there are different behavioral patterns, and I think you experiment for that. I would say, and there's always experimentation humming in the background, I would say we're coming out of a period of intense experimentation where we understand, okay, this is fundamentally a different way of interacting with information. Obviously, we knew that going in, but we have a better idea as to what in the early stages, what that looks like.

16:31Almar Latour: But after that, you actually have to go into structural commercialization. And you have to start understanding who is using that information for what reasons and what is the commercial value for that. And so that is where we find ourselves right now. You do that actually working with customers, right? Big change in media right now. For those of us who are embracing this, it used to be you were in broadcast. The model was very much we create this information for you. We hand it to you. You take it the way the value that we deliver is our curation. The value that we deliver is the creation of the content.

17:13Almar Latour: That still holds true to a large extent. But we also want to work with customers to say, what do you really want to know? because they have been given magical tools with which they can compose information and reconstitute information on their own terms. And so we want to help them with that. Yeah. You've been talking about how our customers will access our data and information and analytics. How are reporters at the Wall Street Journal using AI to do their jobs, to collect information? How is it changing that part of the business? Yeah, reporters are using it as a work tool, as an efficiency tool.

17:50Almar Latour: It helps with research. It helps with creating some convenient shortcuts for end users, like an AI summary at the top of an article, as you now frequently see at the Wall Street Journal, doing much more ambitious research on bigger data sets than before. Those are all areas in which Wall Street Journal or Barron's or Dow Jones Newswire's reporters are active and so much more. I think then there are all the tools that are available to transcribe or analyze podcasts or to translate. I was in Korea recently where I met two extremely brilliant Dow Jones translators who had developed effectively through prompting their own translation from English to Korean with such sophistication that it will power a version of the Wall Street Journal.

19:00Almar Latour: And so you see there's a democratization that takes place with this tool that so many individuals can engage with it on their own terms and do things with it and are, in fact, experimenting with this. And some of that then will become structural, commercial new initiatives. Why can't we get AI to production? Our competitors are already... How do we keep data secure? When do we actually see ROI? All this talk about AI, but talk doesn't transform businesses. AWS AI cuts through the noise, making AI easier to securely deploy and scale. With ready-to-use agents and the broadest set of AI tools and services, you can build, buy, or partner your way.

19:51Stop overthinking. Start building. AWS AI is how. I want to, I opened this podcast talking about trust and I want to dive into that a little bit deeper because it's pretty clear from various credible polls that trust in media has declined. And while the Wall Street Journal has stayed at the top of the mountain, the mountaintop has gotten lower. It's a problem across industry. Why is it?

20:20Almar Latour: Maybe it's gotten narrower, but still very, very high at the very top. But not what it was 20 years ago. Different. Different. Why? What's happened to trust in media and what can you do about it? Well, there are so many different angles to this, but one thing that has happened is that there's a proliferation of sources. There's a proliferation of access. There's a proliferation of the ability, the threshold for entry into media has gone way down. Everybody with a mobile phone can be in media. Yes. I mean, any executive can do a podcast or a vodcast. I mean, where is this world going? So obviously, this is already so well known and we're all used to it.

21:10Almar Latour: But that fragmentation is continuing. And of course, it was ramping up over the past decade plus. And so that has happened. I think at the same time, there are big trends driving the world that have also prompted new questions, right? It's a lack of trust in almost every institution. Almost every institution. And so that is not unique to media or to news media. But I think news media does have a special responsibility and a special role within this. At the same time, I would say some individual deliverers of news have seen a rise in trust from their constituency. Well, right. I should say that what distinguishes the Wall Street Journal is that the polls show that you have balanced trust, in the U.S.

22:14at least, across all political constituencies, which almost no one else does. Yes.

22:20Almar Latour: And that is something that we are deeply committed to, that Emma Tucker, who is driving this effort every day in the newsroom, is deeply committed to, that all of our editors are committed to. We have a code of conduct that both of us have signed that stipulates how you interact in a political sphere. Namely, you don't engage. You don't give your own opinions on X and so on. And so we have, I think, fostered a culture in which that is seen as the highest good, is to make sure that you earn that trust every day. Now, this is not easy. It's not a given. And we have to be incredibly self-critical.

23:01And it's not foolproof. You still have situations where you write a story about the president and Jeffrey Epstein. The president calls it fake news. And probably a significant number of his followers take his side, not yours, in terms of the accuracy of the report. How do you get news back to having the trust that it needs to have for a functioning society in that kind of a world?

23:29Almar Latour: Well, I think, what game are you in? I think first, there is no back. I think we've got to think forward, right? I mean, it's understandable that people are yearning at many different levels of society, yearning maybe to go back to something. I think in our case, we've got to lean into and say, what does it mean to be a news institution in the years ahead? And what should we mean to people in that regard? And that's going to take a different shape, while at the core, it still has to have that trust. I have a concern that AI is going to make this trust problem for media worse before it makes it better, just because it's so easy to create slop for bad actors or just anyone to create quick and not necessarily accurate information.

24:27How do we retain the value of accurate information in that kind of a world?

24:33Almar Latour: Yeah. Well, the relative value of reliable information goes up, right, in this context. When there is more noise, if a group of people decide that here's where I can actually get news that I trust, then the value of that goes up. And so at an individual level or at an institutional level, and certainly this holds true at the moment for Dow Jones and for the Wall Street Journal, the news that our reporters report day in, day out, I would argue has increased its value. And the same goes for our data where you have to have the same type of accuracy guaranteed. Let's talk about you. My least favorite topic.

25:23No, no. It's a great topic. You were, as I said, I've known you for a long time. You have. I don't know how old you were when I first met you, but -

25:35Almar Latour: I think I was 24. 24. Yes, when I walked into your office in Washington, D.C. That may have been the last time I interviewed you. I think it was a pretty critical time for you to interview me because I think I was applying for a job as a news assistant. And I just came out of an internship at the Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels. And do you remember what you asked me? I have no idea. All right. Do you remember? It must have been a pretty impactful appearance there. You said, do you really want this job? and I remember just being baffled. I'm like, of course, man. I want this job. And so I asked you, yes, why wouldn't I want it?

26:26He's like, well, you said you have to deliver mail.

26:29Almar Latour: You have to cut out newspaper clippings. You have to carry mail. You might have to work a night shift. And I said, yes, sign me up. And I did. You made me do all of that, yes. Well, yeah, you did a good job. My mail was always there on my desk. Thank you very much. But it couldn't have been too bad an experience because then you turned around and hired me two years ago. So either you forgot everything that happened back then or it left a decent impression. The clipping out of the newspaper and stamping it with the date sort of made me an early human form of the Internet. And so I got a sense of structural information by filling your filing cabinets.

27:13Almar Latour: But listen, that was, to me, a magical period because from someone who grew up in Holland, did not speak English, coming to the country, not at least at the level that I do now. And so it opened up a world that I hadn't seen before, namely Inside the Beltway, how does Washington work? I got exposure to some of the great writers of our time, including Paul Gigo at the time, Walt Mossberg, who's now retired, was a big tech writer, Jerry Seid. A lot of great columnists, great writers, great reporters yourself. And I got access to how Washington worked and I got to sample that in a very non-threatening way.

28:06So you were committed to journalism at the age of 24. But when did it occur to you that you could be a CEO? Because to be honest, and you know this as well as I do, most journalists don't make very good managers. uh it's it's the rare find who can you know journalism tends to be a very uh singular profession you're there are a lot of loners in our business when did you think i could run this thing

28:35Almar Latour: well i think so slowly and then suddenly sort of the way they say yeah how did you go bankrupt for slowly. And then suddenly he said, how did you become CEO for slowly? And then suddenly, I think looking back, it's easier to spot what I had inside me that attracted me to the position that I currently have. And that is, if I look back, even at being a reporter, I was always filled with ideas on what to do with the business. I love being a reporter. I love being an editor. But on top of that, I was always building. And I think it was a builder by nature. You know, we should point out, I interviewed you twice, actually.

29:22I interviewed you once when you were 24 for the news assistant. I'm sorry, I can't remember any of that. But I remember the other one, which was when I was looking, I was in charge of the digital version of the Wall Street Journal. I was looking for someone to be the editor, and I came into your office in New York, downtown, and you, in an extraordinary 30 minutes, laid out what needed to happen to WSJ.com. Clearly, you had spent a lot of time thinking about it. So you were thinking about running things then, clearly.

29:57Almar Latour: Well, at that point, I think you just walked into my office and asked me this question, and I gave you my thoughts on it. I was always very committed to technology. We were the first ones on the block back in Holland to have a personal computer. In school, I liked doing a little bit of HTML coding and that sort of thing. And so leaning into what's new was natural for me. By the time that you and I met, I was a technology editor. I had written about the rise of mobile. It was just invested intellectually, but also in a practical sense in thinking about that and embracing that and seeing what you can do with it.

30:40Almar Latour: And there was some pent up hunger in me at that time to say, like, well, now let's do that for real. I want to do it. I want to do that. So you understood technology, but where did you learn leadership? I mean, did you have a mentor? Did you have a coach? Is there someone who particularly showed you how to do this? I have many examples and many people who have inspired me along the way, yourself included. Thank you for that. I think leadership, at least in my case, is built bit by bit. It's not one course and you've got the basics. At one point, I did think, oh, is there a course that I need to offset knowledge that I don't have?

31:31Almar Latour: And what I told myself, and this is by not many years ago, is I never want to walk into a room and not understand or not keep up with ACFO or with anyone else in a certain function. What I concluded very quickly after having had a career in journalism was that it's really about ongoing education and constantly learning and not one moment. And when I meet young people, I encourage them to take that attitude that when you start your career, that's when your education also starts. And very deliberately challenging yourself. And it's not just topics that in a literal sense pertain to leadership or pertain even to the industry that you're managing.

32:18Almar Latour: I think it's also topics that just force you to think differently. I just last week took a, I hadn't read Dante for a while, took a course in Dante. Oh my goodness. And wanted to understand. Do you see parallels to the four floors of the Dow Jones office and Dante's Inferno? I think the fourth floor that I walked down to. But the idea being here, other than perhaps the irony of studying hell as a media executive, it is about being able to see a situation, find patterns in it, and give it shape, and understanding what game you're in. And I think challenging yourself to that again and again, sports can be another way of doing that, right?

33:21Almar Latour: Constantly training that, I think, is what at least I require of myself to make sure that I can serve our employees better. I like that. I was going to ask you what's the most important lesson you have learned as a leader, but I think you just answered my question. It's learning. I asked it. Learning. Yeah. I think a level of humility coming into it and understanding that you definitely do not know everything. If I may, just one other important principle is sort of how do you approach leadership? To me, leadership is about service. And I think the best managers live in service of the people that are their colleagues and the people that on paper work for them.

34:10Almar Latour: And I think dedicating yourself to the well-being and the navigating of their careers and their path, I think that is at the core of how I see excellence in leadership. And that is something to strive for. You have something funny. No, no, no. You saw a little smirk. I saw an Alan Murray smirk. Admit it. I saw an Alan Murray smirk. I actually think that was very moving. It was very well put. I agree with it 100%. The only thing I was thinking was that hiring you was one of the best decisions I ever made. I'm glad I made it twice. Almar, thanks very much for having this conversation. It was meaningful to me, but I think very helpful to the people listening.

35:00Almar Latour: Almar, thank you so much. Today's episode was produced by Kevin Burke, Michael Claudio, and Lulu Chang. It was edited by Nicole Zirilla, and my executive producer is Lulu Chang. Why can't we get AI to production? Our competitors are all ready. How do we keep data secure? AWS AI cuts through the noise. With ready-to-use agents and the broadest set of AI tools, stop overthinking, start building. AWS AI is how.