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

Almar Latour (0:00)

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.

Alan Murray (0:13)

The WSJ Leadership Institute Presents Leaders. I'm Alan Murray.

We're gonna do something unusual today. I'm gonna 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 Today, 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.

SPEAKER_3 (1:00)

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Alan Murray (1:23)

Trust is a critical asset in today's business world, and it's especially important if you're in the news business. My 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.

Almar Latour (1:44)

Well, thanks for letting me sign your paycheck. Actually, no longer sign it. I think it's a digital process these days.

Alan Murray (1:52)

You get all the credit.

Almar Latour (1:54)

Thanks so much. You work hard for it, I think. Anyone who watches the vodcast knows that.

Alan Murray (1:59)

Well, thank you. We have a long history together. I'll try not to use any inside knowledge during the course of this interview.

Almar Latour (2:08)

Well, I encourage you to use everything you've got.

Alan Murray (2:13)

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.

Almar Latour (2:23)

Yes.

Alan Murray (2:23)

When I left, this was a struggling business.

The disruption of the Internet had made it hard for all newspaper-based businesses to survive. 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 percent EBITDA margins, you had a record quarter, strong growth.

SPEAKER_3 (2:51)

What happened?

Almar Latour (2:53)

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, this is how many years ago, Alan?

SPEAKER_3 (3:34)

It was 14 years.

Almar Latour (3:35)

14 years ago. So during that, we've gone from print to digital, from digital to mobile, from mobile to social, from 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, long-term support, is a defining foundational difference.

Alan Murray (4:18)

So dig into that a little bit. What 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.

Almar Latour (4:31)

Yes.

Alan Murray (4:31)

Very few of them, maybe none of them, are in the financial position that Dow Jones is in right now. So how did you use your luxury of time?

Almar Latour (4:41)

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.