B (3:55)

Great to be here. Thank you.

A (3:56)

I have a lot to talk about with you. There's an entire set of, I think, complicated AI questions that might be existential for the media industry, but you're heavily invested in building some of that technology and building some of those services, which I think is interesting.

B (4:09)

Yes.

A (4:10)

There's the general state of The Press in 2025, which I want to talk to you about. I know you're very interested in press freedom.

B (4:15)

Yes. But.

A (4:16)

But it happens that I have you on the day after the news, and so I want to start with news.

B (4:21)

Yes.

A (4:21)

Just last night, the Wall Street Journal, of which you are the publisher, restructured how it covers tech and media. That involves cutting about 10 or 12, 15 editors and reporters, Obviously. I'm personally very interested in how you structure a newsroom to cover tech. Why make that decision? Why get smaller?

B (4:38)

This is a newsroom decision. So this is squarely the terrain of Emma Tucker, who is a new editor, relatively speaking, she's in year two, moving into year three. Emma was hired with a remit of helping to increase engagement with our existing readers and to expand our readership and to maintain and enhance the quality of our coverage. She has set out over the past two years really to rethink how she wants to offer news with the Wall Street Journal newsroom. Her consistent message, and this is one that I subscribe to, distinctive journalism is what makes the difference, knowing the interesting story, the story behind the story, and to have exclusive journalism and exclusive insights. So that I say as a preface, because Emma has been making changes to nearly every part of the Wall Street Journal and continues to do that. And so what happened yesterday was a continuation of that. And generally, when you look at, and I'm not speaking specifically about the San Francis bureau about tech, but generally when you look at the changes that have been brought in, she has brought in new talent and she has an antenna for what she thinks works there. And one of the areas where you see that very pronounced in recent months even is in Washington, D.C. that has gone through several cycles of changes. And so she's brought in new people. That has had consequences. And the marching orders are slightly different, where there is a closer connection to the center of the newsroom, where decisions about news can be made in context of a broader story, a macro story that's happening around the world rather than in isolation around a certain topic. So that's the context for yesterday. I'm not going to comment on specific individuals or specific plans from Emma. I'll leave that to her. I've worked with quite a few of those people. As you know, I was a tech reporter myself as well. But overall, what Emma has focused on and what the Journal and Dow Jones are focusing on is going deeper and having more exclusivity, more quote, unquote, proprietary content. And those moments, like yesterday are absolutely never easy.

A (6:59)

I think I see a thesis of Dow Jones as a company. And we'll come to the big picture in a second here. Yes, yes, yes. The idea is you're going to give a bunch of people in the business world an edge and information edge, whether it's with the Dow Jones Information Services or some of the AI tools, or with the Wall Street Journal, which gets a bunch of scoops and tells people stuff they didn't know before. But I'm just kind of looking at this broadly. Dow Jones is part of News Corp. I'm looking at News Corp's latest financials from last month. Revenue at Dow Jones is up to 600 million. That's up 3%. Your earnings are up 7% to 174 million. But the cuts are like in tech, which is dominating the world. And I'm just wondering about that resource allocation, because that's the role of the publisher, I think.

B (7:42)

Yeah. Well, it is in the sense that the newsroom has a budget and we support quality journalism. And frankly, we are so successful at this moment as a company that all of our investments are in enhancing the quality of our journalism, enhancing quality of our data or analytics, et cetera. And so getting better news, getting better information, that is the mission. And so we are investing in that. So I just want to correct one simplification that sometimes comes to the surface at moments like this. And I think. I don't think you intended to do that, but I think it's important to make a distinction. And this is hard when you go through what is, at an individual level, super, super hard what happened yesterday and many times in journalism. But this shift, like any other shift that Emma has gone through, is not to eke out more profit by having fewer resources. There is an overall climate inside our company. You see our earnings growing and you see our revenue grow and our subscript is growing. We will invest wherever there's a good business case to be made. And tech, and the cross section of tech with policy, with politics, with global trade, with society is one of the top stories of top priorities for Dow Jones, top stories in the world. So don't take a snapshot and say, okay, we're going to stop there. This is a top priority. It will permeate. Tech will permeate. Everything is permeating everything right now. Looking at Washington or looking at the announcements from Macron or in France. So don't take the snapshot, I guess, is what I was headed at that. This is a moment in time. Talk again in a year. And our tech coverage should be broader, deeper, and probably have a larger following.

A (9:42)

I think one of the. The questions I have, I run a tech publication.

B (9:47)

Yeah.

A (9:47)

What is nominally a tech publication. And we are. We are heavily invested in covering policy.

B (9:53)

Yes.

A (9:53)

One of the lines we've always used a cliche, even is the Verge can cover everything because everything is now a tech story. And that was a way, I think, 10 years ago of maintaining a broad focus. And now it's very real. Elon Musk is at the State of the Union. You can see the tech giants fighting tooth and nail against the Digital Services act in the eu. And that is now a Part of American foreign policy. Do you see that as, okay, maybe all of the Wall Street Journal is about tech in that way. Is that getting more expansive for you?

B (10:23)

There is a current of tech that runs through every story at the Wall Street Journal, runs through everything at Dow Jones in two ways, as a story and as technology. Right. There's not a part of the Wall Street Journal. There's not a part of Dow Jones where tech does not feature. And therefore having people cover tech in isolation is one way of covering this. In addition, tech becomes a core part of many other Beats and many other areas that we cover. Tech is a horizontal and it's a vertical at the same time.

A (10:58)

We'll come back to the AI deals you've struck. I want to talk about them expansively, but just in this context. Like so many publishers, you've struck a deal with OpenAI, you've struck deals with other AI companies. Are those providing enough revenue for you to invest against in the newsroom, or are you still in wait and see mode with those deals?

B (11:18)

I don't think we should tether our investments in AI to any individual AI deal. So that's not how I look at it. And so it's not like, oh, AI brings in this much money and now I can invest this much in AI. You could, I guess, rationalize. Or the newsroom. AI in the newsroom or in the newsroom. We have our investment priorities and we're following a game plan that we've been following for a while and meanders every once in a while. But the goal is pretty clear. We intend on growing in three ways. One is by going deeper. So investing in the depth of our content, of our data, of our analytics, by growing wider, and that is by adding new areas of expertise. So last week we announced our agreement to acquire Oxford Analytica. So going deep in geopolitics, that's an addition. But in future investments, once they're part of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, we will probably invest in going deeper into that, into that area of geopolitics. And then the third way of growing is by connecting everything that we have, meaning that there should be easier access to the data that underlies everything of Dow Jones for everything that we do at the Wall Street Journal. Now, as to your question, investing in the newsroom. Investing in the newsroom is a. In itself, we are a successful, leading, subscription driven news organization. And we grow by investing in our journalism, not by shrinking our journalism. So we're not. There's sometimes a temptation to be in media in Austerity mode and just take away in order to eke out a profit. That's not us and that's not how we're growing whatsoever.

A (13:02)

I think it's more than a temptation for most media businesses right now. That is the reality of the situation. Right. It costs more to make the information than most people can return on it.

B (13:12)

Yeah. But if your answer to that time and time again is, okay, I'll cut in order to make ends meet. You're not addressing something at the base. You're not addressing something in your model. You might not be addressing something correctly in the way you're organized, maybe where you're focused. So that to me was never an acceptable method to grow or to create great journalism. I understand that sometimes as a company in any industry, you can have your back against the wall. You may have to cut in order to make ends meet. But that's not a strategy. Yeah. And so. But people get that wrong. I think you're absolutely right that that might be sort of a prevailing tendency, but I don't think it should be the prevailing focus. I think should be where do you make a difference in. In the news and information that you offer? How do you make that distinctive? How do you add value? How do you allow people to make decisions based on that? How do you convince people that they should recognize the value of the information that you offer? And people in the past used to say, oh, you're a subscription business, you're the Wall Street Journal because you're all about business. And therefore that doesn't apply to any anything else. I don't think that is true. I think people recognize value of a lot of different types of information. It doesn't just have to be about business. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity actually in shifting from this austerity mode to creation mode and building mode. Easier said than done. And sometimes you have to step away from some things that just aren't working.

A (14:47)

I think that recognition of value is very challenging. I understand why it happens in the business community. I even understand what happens for us in the tech press because it's often tradable. So you can pay a high rate to the Wall Street Journal if you are a Wall street trader or an investor, some other kind of business professional, because the information has such clear value to you that you can use to trade upon in some way to make a deal or make an investment, buy or sell a stock. I think for the average consumer, that information is not tradable. They can just open TikTok and maybe there's some influencer reading the Wall Street Journal to them for free. And that elimination of scarcity, I think, has been the fundamental challenge. It was the challenge when we went to social media, the challenge when we went to these social video platforms. It feels like the challenge again for AI.

B (15:36)

Right.

A (15:37)

The AI platforms are going to take all of the world's information and now completely eliminate even the scarcity of having to click. They're just going to tell you what the models have read on the Internet. Do you perceive that as existential a challenge, as some of your peers in the media do?

B (15:51)

Yeah. First, I think you're absolutely right in that the bar on being distinctive by content or news or information that you create has gone way up. And so you have to be more discerning into where you focus at. You ask about the existential threat around AI that goes back to the recognition of value. And in the first instance, I want to make sure that the industry, but certainly Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal and all of our publications don't fall into a trap. That is similar to two decades ago when all information had to be free and people took scraps from search engines, et cetera, and then found out over time that, hey, we've lost effectively, that we seeded that market. And so that's why we're investing time and resources right now into making sure that large players in the AI space recognize that value. And our push in first instance is to make sure that there is a commercial agreement around that. And I think in many cases that is on both sides of that fence, the preferred outcome. And then where we can't reach a commercial agreement, where there are fundamental differences of opinion, we are prepared in some cases to say, okay, then we'll fight it out in court. And so we've walked both paths with a preference for the first. But I'm still answering your question as to so what's existential here and is there an existential threat? And you spun it forward and we can get to that, what it means for the end user and how consumers respond to that. But I think first we got to get to that. The starting blocks, if you will, which is okay, these are the companies that are providing Genai UX and new interactions for consumers. They have gotten to that point by using information. We need an acknowledgement that information has value, certainly our information, and that if you want to use that information on an ongoing basis that makes sure that some of your gen AI produced content, answer to queries, is current and is reliable, you'll have to pay us for access, if you value that. And so that part we cannot skip over. There's a whole other part of this where we don't yet exactly know how the user is going to interact, but we see the trending there. But that part we have to get right. And we're in the middle of that. Or maybe we're at the first part of that still. Yeah.

A (18:31)

I'm going to ask you one more very existential philosophical question, and I need to get back to having you explain the company. I need to get to your questions.

B (18:39)

All my favorite topics.

A (18:41)

You know, there's that line, a lie goes around the world six times when the truth is putting on shoes. It feels like we might be describing a world where regular people are awash in a sea of free lies. Right. They come to them on social media. The social media companies are giving up on fact checks. Various billionaires say whatever they want on podcasts with no pushback. And then what you are providing is a very expensive source of truth. Or hopefully what I am providing is a affordable source of truth. Yeah, I would say that's a big discrepancy. Right?

B (19:15)

Yeah, I would say we're as affordable as a cup of coffee. Like a day. I mean, everyone drinks coffee. I think it's a myth that access to reliable information is unaffordable. It is an individual choice. I realize it's a hard choice to make if you don't have significant disposable income, and that's what you're indicating. But I do believe that, that, that there is. There's also a choice to be made.

A (19:41)

I understand why people would buy the Wall Street Journal or some of Dow Jones's products we should come to. But that's the bigger picture, right? Is convincing the Net, the next consumer, that they should pay for information as opposed to picking a filter bubble on social media. Whether or not that's AI or if it's social media or if it's just algorithms or whatever, that seems like the challenge the media faces.

B (20:05)

The game is. Or the challenge is convince someone that it's to their benefit to invest in having access to reliable information. Whether that's for making decisions in the realm of investments or technology or policy, or whether it's hyper local. And I actually want to understand what's going on in my community. Some of that I might get from AI, but some of that I might not. And I might want to invest a small amount of money to understand what's happening in my community. And there are some examples of that Popping up. And I think we'll see in response to this huge question that you're asking, we will see innovation in journalism and a lot of creativity already and then in years to come where undeniably, with the truth that you just presented, that there's this flood of information, mixed quality, undeniably. There's also huge demand for reliable information. People are craving it more than ever before. In fact, the more noise there is, the more people are confused and the more they are reaching for, hey, tell me what this means. We see this in our data, right? We see this when there are moments of friction in society or in business or on geopolitics in any market. We see a spike and people coming to us for free, but also we see a spike in subscriptions. Demand for reliable information, I think, has gone up as the pool of unreliable information has grown or uncertain information. Some of it might be reliable, some of it might not be.

A (21:57)

Yeah.

B (21:57)

So I think you cast that as an existential risk. I can also cast that as an opportunity. I like to be aware of the existential risk, take the precautions there, but mainly focus on the opportunity and meeting that demand. And I think we haven't met that demand by any stretch. I think there's a huge opportunity for us and for other publications lying ahead to meet that demand. And I think that demand will actually only grow.

A (22:27)

We need to take a short break. We'll be right back.

B (22:33)

Foreign.

A (22:39)

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B (26:10)

Jones in its most simplified form. Think of Dow Jones. Think of it as a Rubik's Cube, and inside of it is all of our premium journalism, our exclusives, our explanation of what's happening right now. There's our proprietary data that we have on many different sectors in the global economy. There's factiva many sources, thousands and thousands of sources from around the world sitting inside that Rubik's Cube. Each tile on that Rubik's Cube is a way to get out of Dow Jones what is important and relevant to you. Maybe I want a couple of different tiles. Maybe I want the whole thing that's fundamentally a way of thinking about how we operate and how ultimately also we're organized. And AI is actually helping a great deal with this and is accelerating this or generative AI. AI has been and automation has been with Dow Jones for a long, long. Let's then make that a little bit more complex than that. But if one of those styles is about bond trading, I ought to be able to get all information, premium information, live information, but also analytics and forecasting out of Dow Jones to help me in my job. The way that we're organized is sort of the cards that I was dealt when I took over almost five years ago as CEO was to look at the Dow Jones as a platform of verticals. You've got business news. It's both a horizontal and a vertical. But that's the Wall Street Journal, as you say, needs no huge explanation. There. There's wealth and investing where we have Barron's, MarketWatch Financial News, which is a title in the UK, but also private equity news. We've got a compliance arm that has data on compliance. It helps companies discern should I do business with this person or not? Are they on a sanctions list? On we've added since an energy arm and within that commodities and petrochemicals. We've added a leadership arm organically looking at what it takes to be a modern leader. And each of these verticals, if you will, are successful. When they do four things. You have to have news and leading news in that particular vertical, in that particular area of concentration. So pick your industry. We've got to be. Unless you have that, you're not relevant. Second, you have to have proprietary data. Some of that can come out of the news, some of it you have to build, some of you have to buy. And we've done that. If you have those two things, you can do proper analytics. AI helps with that to some degree. And that's where the value keeps on going up. If you sell products that can do forecasting and analytics and then the fourth factor is convening power that is bringing people in that industry, in that sector, in that vertical, bringing them together. And if you have those four, you get actually a mini network effect inside that industry. We've seen that, for example, happen, and it didn't happen by happened, by design. We've executed against this with our manager, Joel Lang, who runs our risk and compliance business. If you have all those four parts, then you see the leaders in that industry come together and let's say, take the risk and compliance. You see compliance officers coming together and our compliance council at Davos and in other places. And so now you have thought leaders there. Well, the procurement officers who buy our data products and see that, oh, yeah, the people that are leading my department or leading my company are talking on a Dow Jones platform about these big themes. So it anchors Dow Jones more deeply. Whether that's just an observation, an anecdot, or whether that actually translates into business, often it translates into business that has the same effect on other analytical products. And then if you add news to it in that risk vertical, we have mentioned internally that we will have a risk journal. So you will have risk industry folks, compliance officers and the like, tap into that risk news product to actually start their workday and understand what's happening now, end to end, we are present in your workflow in that industry. And by the way, since we're the Wall Street Journal and that's an extension as well, we probably also, when you go home, we're still with you in another way. So that's the view of the company and our operating model. Build verticals that have these four parts at a minimum, go deeper and make that exclusive. This is why what Emma is doing in the Wall Street Journal newsroom really matters. More exclusives, more distinctive journalism helps with that first part with the news. Obviously, we've built and bought and created more proprietary data. We've spent well in excess of a billion dollars on getting companies that are specialized in that added to our roster. We're doing more analytics and even a little bit of consulting. We're never going to be a consulting company, but that's an outflow of analytics and then convening power. I think for a long time in the media was sort of misread as just events, but it's something bigger, bigger than that. I think it's a subscription business. It's a recurring revenue business, should be. It doesn't mean that you can't have sponsorship for it, but it is fundamental to anchoring the decision makers of a certain industry in your platform. So we have that stack when you. When we have that, we call it a full stack. So we've got a full stack in risk, we're building a full stack in energy, in subsets of energy. And so, so we're going deeper there and then you see us in the future. It's a scalable model because we now understand how do you build these verticals? Either we can use mine, the Wall Street Journal for new verticals because we see what people gravitate to, where do we have the expertise and then build on that, or we can inorganically add as well. Or we can organically start outside the Wall Street Journal newsroom. So. So going deeper, going wider, and then connecting everything is where ultimately, if you go back to the Rubik's Cube, if you want to buy that whole Rubik's Cube, we will also make that possible for you. So we're making sure that these magnificent data pools are going to be available. And some of this is of course, still in the works, but going to be available to our journalists so that they can do exclusive work with that.

A (32:56)

You're describing Dow Jones is something that makes really high quality, rigorous information across its newspapers, magazines, across its data products. That sits within News Corp. How often do you hang out with Rupert Murdoch?

B (33:11)

I wouldn't put it in the category of hanging out whatsoever. Just a healthy, friendly interaction. He's chairman emeritus. He's built the caricature on a side. He's built enormous media success stories over time. And so from a business point of view, there was certainly in my early days, there was a lot to learn from how do you create businesses and such? But from News Corp, there's been nothing but support for our growth story. And so I'm very thankful for that. That's Rupert's Laughlin. It's also Robert Thompson. It's a whole apparatus. But the access to capital that we've had as Dow Jones to five years ago, we hadn't done, I think, an acquisition for well over a decade. Now we've done billions in acquisitions. That's support. I would say that's a vote of confidence for the direction that we're taking for the strategy that I outlined to you, going deeper, growing wider, connecting things. But there's also a deep respect for the independence of the Wall Street Journal and the value that comes with that. And so I've seen that consistently applied. That's my answer to your hangout question.

A (34:24)

Rupert Murdoch plays on both sides of the information crisis. Right. You can watch his other properties create whatever reality is politically expedient for Donald Trump. And then I can see the Wall Street Journal rigorously cover the impact of tariffs all the way down to the opinion pages, which sometimes say the tariffs are bad.

B (34:41)

Oh, no, they don't just say tariffs are bad. The Opinion page. As Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada yesterday, in a sense, this press conference said, I don't often, I'm paraphrasing here, I don't often quote the Wall Street Journal, but they said that this trade war is the stupidest trade war in history or something along those lines. We don't hold back or our opinion pages don't hold back. And their assessment based on well established principles of free markets and free people. And so that we both smile for obvious reasons, I'm sure you ask about it, that is is core to who we are. The independence to make that judgment is core to who we are. And yeah, for my part, I'm focused on the Dow Jones part of making sure that that sings.

A (35:27)

But do you see that contradiction? Do you think your team see that contradiction? That you're trying to sell really high quality information while another part of the structure that has the same ownership is contributing to an information crisis?

B (35:41)

Listen, I can't comment because of shared ownership structure. I'm not going to comment on my colleagues at Fox. We had y protesters outside on Fox Square and people are protesting that while the reporters, the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones are doing their job. So there is an awareness of the perception of Fox and what we're focused on. But I think there's also a great awareness amongst our staff and has been for now over 15 years that those two things are separate without specifically commenting on how you characterize that, because I'm just not going to get into that.

A (36:22)

I want to ask the last decoder question and I want to end by talking about AI kind of @ length here. You've had to make a lot of decisions, right? You've changed the way the company works a lot.

B (36:32)

A lot. Yeah.

A (36:32)

You obviously have a way of thinking about the company that's very specific. Although I will say Rubik's Cubes are meant to be solved. And I'm not sure that you want anyone solved. I think you want them to remix the cube, not solve it. But what's your framework for making decisions? How do you make decisions?

B (36:45)

Well, I take in information a lot and so I'd like to be so probably to a fault, be familiar with the facts on the ground. And so I'm very consultative, take in expertise, absorb. So I feel like I have a level of mastery sufficient to then make a decision. That's one part I'm very inquisitive. I think the strength of good journalists is they know how to ask questions and they're driven by curiosity. As a company we're driven by curiosity. As an executive, I'm driven by, by curiosity, I want to figure out how things interact to understand the nuances. And so that's for my part, I also at the same time believe in letting managers manage or creators create and making sure that what I'm doing is to help make those managers or those creators make them successful. And so depending on where we're focused, if we're focused on something that is important for the whole company, I will be informed and I will make the decision consulting my management team within the framework of the strategy that I've outlined and the intricacies of that. I am a firm believer in letting the managers make decisions. And so I have a very flat structure where there is a lot of autonomy to, within that framework, make decisions because I think that allows people to move faster, allows the company to move faster, allows us to experiment without going through a central clearinghouse constantly. And so I want to, I guess both. I want, on the one hand, I want to have the expertise so I'm informed. There's a limit to that because you can't do that when you are thinking about macro issues, about everything. And so I have to be judicious in how I do that, where I focus that thirst and then on the other hand, having that flat structure and empowering people.

A (38:40)

We have to take another break. We'll be back in just a minute. Where'd you go for the long weekend if you spent most of your time online, you couldn't escape the rumors that the president was dead. Trump hasn't been seen in days. The bruises on his hands. Vance said he's ready to take over if something happens. If Trump's dead, they should bury JD.

B (39:08)

Vance alive with him like they did.

A (39:09)

With pharaohs and their cats.

B (39:11)

Imagine. Imagine not believing Trump is dead just because there's no evidence. Where's your sense of whimsy and joie de vivre?

A (39:18)

By Sunday, Donald Trump himself had to weigh in. Never felt better in my life. Also, DC Is a crime free zone. I'm alive and I fixed DC on Today. Explained from Vox. We're gonna assess that second claim because it's bold. It is a literal statement that President Trump has free 700,000 people in this.

B (39:41)

City who were living under the rule.

A (39:43)

Of criminals and thugs. He literally liberated D.C. and he wants to do Chicago next. Imagine a future where you can open your phone and call a flying taxi. Long just fantasy. Flying taxis are startlingly close to reality. Or so say my guest. Guest this week on Solutions with Henry Blodgett next decade we'll be certified in 28. We'll be producing these things in 29 and 30. And then it's off to the races when Moy Stanley put out a report saying this will be a $15 trillion TAM by 2050, much larger than the automotive market. This week I talked to the CEO and a major investor of Vertical Aerospace, one of three companies trying to make flying taxis a reality. Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett to hear more. What is up, people of the Internet? My name is Marques Brownlee, AKA mkbhd, and some of the biggest smartphones of the year are about to launch, including the brand new iPhone 17 is around the corner with a model you've never seen before. So on the Waveform podcast, myself and co hosts Andrew Manganelli and David Amell gather the biggest tech news of each week and then discuss at length everything we're excited about, about, and sometimes things we're not so excited about. So this time of year, we like to call smartphone season. So if you're interested in hearing all the latest releases from Apple and Samsung and Google and others, be sure to check out the Waveform podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. See you there. Welcome back. I'm talking to Dow Jones CEO Omar Latour. Before the break, we were talking about one of the big decoder questions, how he makes decisions. Now we're going to take that idea and put it into practice, specifically around AI, which has become a major part of Dow Jones business over the last few years. Let's apply that to AI.

B (41:35)

Yes, that framework.

A (41:36)

I think it's useful to have the framework where we talk about this next set of big shifts, because that's a lot of decisions. You mentioned Factiva earlier. That's a data platform. You're promising some generative AI tools there. You want to offer more of those tools to your customers across the board. You've made some deals with OpenAI at the same time you're suing perplexity. What is the shape of the AI opportunity to you? When you look at it broadly, you're suing perplexity. You think they're taking information away from you without compensating you. You've made a deal with OpenAI at some rate. We can talk about whether that rate is enough. And then you're offering the tools to the users. Right. When you look at that whole set of things, the number one question to me is, okay, how big of a business is this really? Because I don't know if anyone's making more money from AI than they're spending on building the tools right now.

B (42:29)

So we are, I think in a very, very early stage in that. And so it's hard to say. What I can say is that on the product side, we see some of our products outperform versus what we had planned for them. So we have a product in our risk business called Integrity Check. Like it's more of a self serve model where you don't have to wait for Dow Jones to get back to you and do its computation using AI ourselves, but out of review of the customer, but instead having the customer do some basic research on risk and compliance themselves, sort of assessing who they can do business with and getting that to sort of an 80% reliability from there, then using that as a springboard to say, okay, now within this, the remaining 20%, I need help from the company. Company, that product is fairly young and that's performing outside expectations. It's outperforming expectations. So on the whole I think this will be a net positive. But we got to unpack what we're talking about first. We got to get the foundational elements of this right. If we don't have proprietary information that is truly proprietary, then we're going to lose this game. So, so you see us engage in building products, building a marketplace with factiva, and deploying tools internally. But all of that has to happen in tandem with solving that foundational question.

A (43:58)

So let me ask you, last summer, the deal with OpenAI, the reporting is that it's about $250 million.

B (44:05)

Read the wall Street Journal.

A (44:07)

That's what the Wall Street Journal says, so I believe them. I had Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, on the show a few months ago. He told me one of the reasons that he made a deal was to set the market rate, which is useful for fair use litigation, which is useful for other kinds of deals. Do you think 250 million is enough of a rate to set the market?

B (44:30)

I mean, you got to ask. I'm not going to talk about specific amounts, but you got to ask, what is that amount for? And then what I am personally less interested in is like a single amount, but more an operating model and a business model for how you do business going forward over a long period of time. Time, how does that operate is when information is used, is that the value of that information recognized along the way? And is there a mechanism that helps realizing that valuation?

A (45:02)

So set the dollars aside inside of the OpenAI deal. What are the signals you're looking for that indicate whether the deal was a.

B (45:07)

Success or a failure just simply because of that, because of the way we've set up that deal. I'm not going to talk specifically about that deal. It was a super nice try because I almost bet I'm going to try it again. No, I'm sure you. But more broadly I can say so how can you tell that generative AI tools that you're deploying or models that you're deploying within your own business, how are they successful? And it's by usage and is it generating revenue on a consistent basis? Is it just a blurp like, oh, it's a novelty factor? Now we move on. We're pretty early in that process, so I don't know yet what's ahead. Fake, what's real for some of the products, I can tell this is real. Real, right. Some of it is a shift in user experience and in user requirements. And this is going to have to be table stakes. Offer a UX that is built around generative AI because the customer expects that. So you're getting at the trickiness of establishing the value writ large. But overall I think of generative AI is an accelerant for the strategy that we have. It will allow us to go deeper in our verticals faster and more efficiently and in ways that we couldn't even imagine. And we've all talked about the wonders of generative AI but doing research in ways that we couldn't do before, human and otherwise. Within Dow Jones, we talk about authentic intelligence. That's the combination of generative AI and human guidance. And we find that that's a sweet spot for certain B2B products that we're building. So it's accelerating going deeper, it will accelerate going wider. That is scaling our vertical strategy because we can stand up verticals much faster, whether that's a geographic vertical, because now we can say, all right, we can launch in this language and it's so reliable and it's a lot cheaper. And then connecting everything is a massive generative AI is a massive accelerant because now with a thin layer on top, we can extract data from all these different data pools.

A (47:18)

Do the tools work well enough for.

B (47:19)

You to trust it on a case by case basis? When it's very specific and we are answering a question from a customer and it's often a co creation where we are solving a certain problem and we have very narrow parameters, then I think it works. When you go wide, you get a wide answer. And so. So our strategy is built around being specific, being Focused on verticals and AI fits nicely with that and in fact allows us to go much deeper, be much more specific and be more discerning. And so under each vertical you can create sub verticals using a much larger data pool.

A (47:58)

You're describing something that happens within Dow Jones, within its products more broadly. News Corp has been pretty harsh about platforms and work. News Corp CEO Robert Thompson, I think famously is critical of Google. The company was behind the laws in Australia that require platforms to pay publishers for linking. AI represents that opportunity as well, or that challenge as well, right? That instead of using your tools, someone might use a ChatGPT or a Google Gemini or something and just receive an answer. Do you think that these deals you're making, are they hedges against that outcome? Are they investments in that outcome? A lot of publishers, for example, I'll just give the example of sort of the millennial digital media startup boom were predicated on. We will just be the most viral thing on Facebook and Facebook will pay us that money. And that obviously did not pan out. And I think people are very wary of making that same mistake with AI. But you have one of these deals, so how are you doing?

B (48:56)

No, but this is why at the very start I said I see those deals in a separate category. It's foundational. It's about principles. The money to be made in AI is. Is it's really on us to make sure.

A (49:07)

It's on your proprietary tools.

B (49:09)

It's on us that what our Genai answer spits out is relevant to our customer in a way that some other provider with maybe a more general offer is not. And so we have to make sure that when we combine our proprietary journalism and our proprietary data and our convening power with generative AI and with LLMs, we have to make sure that what the outcome is to a query is a reliable and B is something that you can't find somewhere else, or B, at the scale of where you can find it somewhere else within that vertical. So I think there's a distinction between establishing the principles and getting value for that getting forward value if you are being used. But then there is a separate category of, of efficiency tools that we use in the company and yet another category where we say, here's where we build products that have to answer a certain question that exists in the market in any different industry in our case, and we're going to give a superior answer and you're going to need that answer in order to be more successful than the next person working on solving that problem in a certain industry. So if that's about energy pricing and forecasting energy prices, we want to be the most reliable on that, or what's happening in the chemical industry, we want to be the leading voice in that. And generative AI should be one way in which you get that out of us, but in a proprietary sense. And so that should be hopefully very different than going to any chatbot and asking that same question. And maybe you get an approximation, but might not be as reliable, but hopefully there'll be sufficient proprietary data in our answer that will make that competition uneven in our advantage. And so that, I think, is the task. I feel very strongly that we cannot go in to this new era with a view of, well, this is what these companies have to do for us. Like, we have to agree on the principles and the value, but then it's really up to us to create superb products and answers to complex questions in a very complex world to realize the value that these new tools offer. And so both those things have to exist.

A (51:42)

I've talked to a lot of publishers and media CEOs over the past several years about where the traffic comes from, how the payments work, where the value is going. Setting aside AI for a minute, it feels like the nuclear question everyone is asking is, well, if Google is just indexing our sites and taking the data, eventually we will have to block Google in a way that many publishers were comfortable using their robots file to block OpenAI and other crawlers. Have you ever considered going that far?

B (52:14)

Oh, I'm not going to speak specifically to Google. We're a partner and we have lots of things that we do together, things that we disagree on.

A (52:22)

News Corp, I think famously the most outspoken in this year. That's why I was comfortable asking the question.

B (52:26)

No, no, no, Absolutely. So this is not on my radar in the way that you express that. But that's the short answer to that, I think. I guess in a. In a. Taking your question in a different way, we have to emphasize Ono, and we have to make sure that being in our world, in our universe, in your individual vertical, or in one of our broader products or entire Rubik's Cub, you have an experience that you cannot have somewhere else. That's on us. How far do you go in putting a wall around that? Yeah, we'll see over time.

A (53:03)

You are in litigation against Perplexity. They've taken some data. I think you don't like that. I'm guessing by the fact that the lawsuit was filed. If you win that case or the New York Times Company wins its case, against OpenAI or I know Sheryl Crow wins her case. That will upend the market as we understand it. Right. There will be some new fair use precedent that is created. How does that change how you think about building and deploying your own AI tools?

B (53:29)

Again, I put this in a separate box like we got to build our.

A (53:35)

Well wait, let me challenge you on that for one second just to get it into the right framework. Right now it feels like the entire industry is just assuming that win or lose these cases the money will be sorted out and be able to build build at the same rate we've been building. Right. OpenAI. Well, maybe they'll win or lose. Maybe the rates go up and it's just more expensive to see what OpenAI is doing because they have to pay all the singer songwriters in the world. Maybe. It also seems to me that potentially the rates are so high that the entire structure of the industry changes.

B (54:09)

The industry in this case AI.

A (54:10)

The AI. Suddenly we have to. The compliance cost of making sure all of our data is licensed before we feed it into the model for traffic training skyrockets because the penalties are high under copyright law. That feels like an under considered risk. These lawsuits are just going to play out and something will happen. The way that I think Google was able to roll over the Viacom lawsuit when YouTube started or the Google Books lawsuit because they were sort of the plucky upstart and the value of those tools was so high that they got to win a bunch of lawsuits. I don't think the AI companies feel like plucky upstarts. I don't think that public sentiment is with a bunch of giant tech company billionaires anymore. It feels like those lawsuits might go the other way. And at that point some of the tools you are using to build with or some of the partners you have, their cost structures might change so dramatically.

B (55:00)

That that is going to stop us from.

A (55:02)

Yeah. That everyone's strategy has to change. And I'm just wondering how much you.

B (55:05)

Are considering that I see where you're going with that. I think the answer to the individual cases it's a. The little bit the blind man and the elephant. There are different patches of fair use that different legal cases are pursuing. One case is not going to. It might reverberate but is not going to be necessarily absolute. And so I hate to say this as an answer to any question, but there is a big wait and see at the moment. I got to go on the assumption that as a technology generative AI is present in my world is going to be present. Even more is going to be present and an expectation from consumers, whether they're corporate or consumers out in the wild. And so we cannot continue to build and then think at the same time, like, oh, it may all just disappear. And by the way, we might be the culprit because we're applying that. Which is. It's an interesting scenario. I don't think it will play out that way, but.

A (56:05)

But you're one of the litigants. That's what I mean. It's interesting because you don't know that.

B (56:10)

It will be debilitating. I don't think that the commercial agreement that we have with OpenAI, the value of which I can. But if you decided that, that has obviously not stopped OpenAI from developing. And so I believe in market mechanism, and I think that's where we'll end up, that there will be a gravitation to that rather than stopping the industry in its tracks.

A (56:35)

OpenAI famously has not made $1 in profit. That's the thing that I. It's right. They have to build a business that's valuable enough to support dealers. Yeah.

B (56:41)

But Amazon didn't for a long time.

A (56:43)

I feel like we've brought up Jeff Bezos in a variety of ways on this episode.

B (56:46)

Yeah.

A (56:46)

No, I'm very curious to see how your lawsuit plays out with perplexity and how those businesses develop. I'll have to have you back as that progresses, because.

B (56:56)

My pleasure.

A (56:56)

There's something there that feels. It's almost invisible. You're blind, man. And the elephant. It's there, there. It's very big. And I think this next year, we'll see how it shapes the business. I want to end by talking about press freedom. It's something you care about a lot. You've talked about it a lot. Obviously, you're the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. You famously had Evan Gershkovich detained in Russia in March 2023. You worked very hard across a number of administrations to. To bring him back. This is a very challenging time for press freedom, both abroad and it feels like in the United States. What's your view of the landscape of right now?

B (57:28)

We live in a time of tremendous change of polarization, and that makes covering the news trickier than ever before. It also, I think, increases the value and the contribution that we bring to society as a free press. And so, on the one hand, with all the changes that we're seeing and with all the challenges that we're seeing, including against media, this is a time that any journalist should Be made for if your heart is in explaining complexity to the world, there's never been a time when we've had this to grapple with. And so I think on the one hand, we can offer enormous value. On the other hand, it's become a lot harder to do that. And the statistics around the world don't lie. There are well over 300 people who were killed last year doing journalism. People been put in prison. And there is a harsh dialogue in society that makes it, under many circumstances, less comfortable to go after a story. Sometimes I measure whether we did a story well by how much I got in terms of complaints from the left and from the right. Right. After certain stories. And, and so there's. The temperature is, is high.

A (58:52)

But let me, let me push you on that, too.

B (58:55)

Yes, please.

A (58:55)

That is, that's an old chestnut in journalism. Right. If everyone's unhappy, you're doing your job. Right. We're in a place.

B (59:01)

It's also like my daily existence, honestly. Right. So that, that is, that is, it's a very young chestnut. And for, for me, I mean, it's, it's, it's there every day. And, but we, but yes, I know where you, where you want to go.

A (59:15)

This is a pretty asymmetric information landscape right now. One side is vastly more willing to lie. One side is vastly more willing to even change the data. The Trump administration is making noise that they'll take government spending out of gdp, which would dramatically change almost everything the Wall Street Journal does. Right. Like, at the most fundamental level, we might not be able to trust the government data anymore. That's a threat to press freedom. At the same time, they will spin it as a good thing. Elon Musk is out there trying to spin this as a good thing. You don't see the left playing that kind of game with the data in that way to sort of metaphysically create political outcomes. Right. There's not as much trying to tweet things into reality that Elon is doing.

B (59:58)

So I'm not going to left right things in this conversation. What I can say is how do you respond to an information ecosystem? Or maybe in an asymmetrical manner.

A (60:11)

I'm saying how do you respond to an information ecosystem where Donald Trump has threatened to sue pollsters in Iowa that he didn't like the results of their poll? Or where Brendan Carr, the chairman of the fcc, is potentially holding up the CBS Skydance merger over his investigation of 60 Minutes editorial content?

B (60:32)

Yeah. So it's a very clear answer, I think, to that. It's not an easy answer, but the first answer is, is stick to your principles. In our case, we believe in reporting the facts in the newsroom, we believe in free markets and free people on the opinion side. And you stick to that and you do not let go. All right? And you double down on that. And that's our contribution to the information ecosystem. And we're going to do more of that. And by the way, that's a demand driven thing as well. But we're talking about press freedom. This is an answer to that. You're not going to change your reporting. If you start doing that, if you start making concessions and you're reporting and omitting facts that you know to be true or start self censoring, then that game is, is lost.

A (61:18)

You have.

B (61:19)

That's one. Okay. Second, you got to keep a cool head. We live in an environment where taunting and provocation is the norm. And so you can take that bait or you cannot, then you have to then, in my view, not be hysterical in response to every little provocation that might exist. And in fact, you might get more respect if, if you do not respond to every provocation. And then you have to recognize the moments when principles are at stake, when you have to fight or you have to express your disagreement. And so keep on doing what you're doing, do even more of it, in our case, reliable. Create reliable information. It's going to be good for society, it's going to be good for you as an organization. Keep a cool head and stick to your principles. And that last part is also non negotiable. All these three, in fact, non negotiable. You got to stick to your principles. If you start shifting and making certain concessions at the wrong, wrong moment, there will be a very high price to pay for that.

A (62:34)

You have colleagues in similar positions across the media that are making concessions. Right. ABC settled its case with the Trump administration. CBS looks like they might settle the 60 Minutes case because the threat of the Skydance deal being blocked in some way hangs over them. Are you saying you would not make those concessions? Are you saying they should not?

B (62:57)

I'm not saying either one of those because I'm not commenting on their individual situation. I just think that there are moments where as an organization, you're going to have to evaluate. And the AP just went through this. Is this a moment where I speak out and where I stick to my guns or not? And I think those moments you better choose carefully, you better have a clear view of your principles and understand what you actually stand for and understand the ramifications, because people will point back to certain moments and you want to make sure that you're on the right side of that.

A (63:32)

Now, I'm going to ask you this more directly because I think I just need to hear it therapeutically. But I think your reporters probably need to hear it too. If the pressure comes to you from the Trump administration, are you saying that you'll fight in a way that it feels like a lot of other big media companies are choosing to cave?

B (63:46)

I think the question is just to load it and that you make it very specific. I think we have fought for our principles for decades. We have stood up for our reporting for decades. We have a legal team that is incredibly strong that has fought for press freedom and for our journalism again and again. If we make a mistake, we correct. We own up to that. And that is absolutely part of the value structure we stand up for Principles. Principles, period.

A (64:20)

What happens if the generative AI makes a mistake?

B (64:23)

It depends on what mistake it is. And so we actually, in building and co creating some of these products that answer very narrow questions. We were sometimes surprised at mistakes that snuck in and we just wanted to make sure that we can't release products without having screened for that. But you're going to have to correct. Yeah.

A (64:44)

Do you think that that information environment where, where some of the tools are less reliable and some of the institutions are less reliable or perhaps even openly hostile to the press, do you think that's something that you will be able to chart as Dow Jones alone? Or do you think that's an industry wide effort because it does not feel like there's a lot of coordination across the industry right now?

B (65:05)

I think the industry should shoulder a lot of this together in a loosely formed coalition or through solidarity. But I'm focused on Dow Jones success. But I certainly share and our values, but I certainly share our findings with colleagues all the time. And there's a very active dialogue amongst media leaders that A, I want to foster and B, I participate in. And so if you look at very difficult moments like the Evan case or getting people out of Afghanistan during the rapid withdrawal from US Forces there, we worked very, very closely together. There's very close contacts amongst a lot of those leaders. I think that's a healthy thing and I would like to see more of it.

A (65:54)

Well, Amar, you've given us so much time. Tell us what's next for Dow Jones?

B (65:57)

Well, it's tomorrow's news, so I want you to tune in and so definitely come to the Wall Street Journal every day. But for us. You'll see us focus on international rebalancing. We're rebalancing our portfolio to make sure that that we are as strong outside the borders of the US as we are here, focused on video, focused on deeper data products. But overall we will continue to be focused on what we have been focused on for the entirety of our existence, and that's providing reliable information.

A (66:28)

Amazing. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

B (66:30)

Thank you so much for having me.

A (66:35)

I'd like to thank Omar for taking the time to join me on Decoder Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder@the verge.com we really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads or Blue sky and we have a TikTok and an Instagram. Now they're both at Decoder Pod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get Podcasts Decoder is production the Verge a part of the Vox Community Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox, Nick Stat. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Brakemaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Listen.

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