Picture-Illustration: Intelligencer; Picture: Getty Photos
The so-called media apocalypse that began off 2024 was, economically talking, not an occasion that lived as much as its biblical proportions. Sure, 1000’s of journalists throughout the nation misplaced their jobs at shops just like the Washington Submit, the Los Angeles Instances, and throughout Condé Nast, largely as a result of decline in advert cash funding newsrooms’ budgets. There have been spectacular implosions at The Messenger and Sports activities Illustrated, too — each finest learn as cautionary tales of homeowners and executives making dangerous choices. However the information trade has largely moved on. The Olympics and the wild election season have created a information bonanza, and OpenAI has been chopping offers to pay media firms for entry to their content material. The layoffs in latest months, with some exceptions, have been smaller. Even BuzzFeed, which has stooped to monetary engineering to maintain its inventory from getting delisted, has managed to drag off not-terrible offers for a few of its hottest websites.
On Friday got here extra excellent news, this time from Rupert Murdoch’s Information Corp. The corporate’s flagship Dow Jones division, which owns The Wall Avenue Journal, now has 5.8 million subscribers — up from 5.2 million on the finish of 2023. The Journal itself noticed an 11 p.c rise in digital subscriptions and now has 4.25 million print and on-line subscribers. That enterprise is making a lot cash now that Dow Jones is greater, by income, than Information Corp’s separate news-media division, which incorporates the Solar, the New York Submit, and different Murdoch-owned papers.
In fact, the Journal didn’t get up to now rapidly or simply. The 135-year-old paper is in its second yr beneath editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, who has reduce jobs throughout bureaus and confronted walkouts and offended Submit-it notes from reporters upset by the sudden lack of their colleagues. It has nonetheless not been capable of confirm a disputed story about in depth ties between the United Nations Aid and Works Company in Palestine and Hamas, in keeping with Semafor. Nonetheless, the Tucker period has been marked by a broader method to enterprise information, concentrating on an viewers past the bankers and traders who usually made up its core readership, my colleague Charlotte Klein reported for Self-importance Truthful. That reveals up in deeply reported tales on Iran, manipulation on TikTok, and charmingly quirky protection of the Olympics — and that’s simply this week.
The Journal has extra benefits to attract on than a lot of its competitor organizations. The newsroom has a deep properly of expertise, and the corporate has the sources to pursue probably the most formidable of scoops and investigations. The corporate additionally has a costlier, and profitable, knowledge bundle for enterprise purchasers, which drove extra of Dow Jones’s progress, in keeping with the earnings report. And any earnings from Information Corp’s take care of OpenAI — which the Journal reported “could possibly be value greater than $250 million” by 2029 — will not be readily obvious from the quarterly report.
Earlier this yr, Dow Jones’s CEO, Almar Latour, gave Axios a view into its technique for this yr. “We’re not going to be a way of life firm. We’re not going to be a gaming firm. We’re not going to be a cooking firm,” he stated. “We’re going to as a substitute deal with how we may help folks make choices.” (That is, presumably, a reference to the skilled providers.) This, in fact, was a thinly veiled jab on the the New York Instances (which additionally owns The Athletic, a cooking app, and video games like Wordle).
These are, primarily, two fully divergent methods for the way forward for media. Dow Jones seems to see information as part of a broader knowledge stream that helps folks do their jobs, whereas the Instances sells it as a key a part of its readers’ off-duty lives. However zoom out, and it’s not just like the Journal is taking away from the Instances’ readership. This week, the Grey Woman reported it added 300,000 subscribers simply within the final quarter, after it introduced on 210,000 through the first three months of the yr. Collectively, that’s greater than 1.1 million new subscribers simply to Dow Jones and the Instances this yr — and that’s earlier than the election season actually acquired bizarre this July.
Clearly, each fashions work. As each firms develop, they’ll probably be capable of negotiate higher advert charges, which may then fund extra of their operations and, in flip, enable them to increase even additional. This isn’t fairly one of the best information for the media trade, because it favors solely the biggest incumbents, but it surely additionally reveals that there are nonetheless tens of millions of readers on the market who wish to pay for information. The postapocalyptic scene may not be such a foul place — at the very least, least for some information shops.
