The Wall Street Journal has been ramping up its push into video and had plans for an ambitious slate of streaming TV shows.
Internal documents viewed by Business Insider described an initial six-series offering that would include a flagship live morning program and an interview show hosted by the Journal’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker. The docs are from the summer, and a person familiar with the Journal’s strategy said that its plans, including dates and partners, are in flux.
The docs said the Journal had been “in negotiations” with creators such as Feed Me Substacker Emily Sundberg, as well as with the restaurant discovery platform The Infatuation. Sundberg dropped out of the talks a few weeks ago, Business Insider has learned.
The plans called for the shows to launch on the Journal’s own channels, YouTube, and social media.
Journal parent company Dow Jones is also hiring a head of programming and content, who would be tasked with building “something ambitious in video.” The live job description says the role will pay up to $330,000 in base salary, and involve developing talent that includes employees and external creators, translating the company’s journalism into streaming formats, and creating live and on-demand shows.
The Journal and Dow Jones’s effort shows how news outlets traditionally known for the written word — including The New York Times — are racing to beef up their video offerings in a media landscape that’s seeing both the rise of social video and the decline of cable TV news. It also demonstrates that Tucker is taking a flexible approach to the market by looking to both build shows around in-house talent, including herself, and partner with creators and other media companies.
“Expanding our video presence across Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal is a major strategic priority, as we have widely communicated,” a Dow Jones spokesperson said. “We are actively hiring leadership to shape and execute our go-to-market strategy for video across Dow Jones, and we look forward to sharing our updated plans when ready.”
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The Journal name-checked familiar figures
The internal docs viewed by Business Insider described the live morning show as a 60-minute-long anchor of the initial slate. The docs said the Journal enlisted some familiar names in morning news and video to help execute the show. They said the Journal has been working with the production company EverWonder, which was cofounded by the former Time Studios executive Ian Orefice with backing from Jeff Zucker’s RedBird IMI.
Another show in the proposed slate in the docs was “The Exchange with Emma Tucker,” which was billed as a “prestige interview franchise” that would put viewers “in the room with the people running the global economy.” The documents name-checked top CEOs, including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink, as potential guests.
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The person familiar with the Journal’s strategy said the documents represented one of a number of different avenues the outlet was exploring and didn’t reflect the current status and form of its efforts. The person said the company is in active conversations with a number of external people for potential partnerships.
The documents said the Journal had been “in negotiations” with Sundberg — which have since ended — for a show called “Feed Me, On Camera” that would introduce her “highly engaged, younger creator audience to WSJ while bringing WSJ’s scale, authority, and affluent professional audience to her world.” The docs envisioned each episode beginning with a “tip, obsession, or question from the Feed Me universe,” and following Sundberg to its conclusion while integrating business context and reporting from the Journal.
Other shows the docs said the Journal had explored included one called “Market Price with The Infatuation” that would tackle the “business behind taste, literally.” It would combine the cultural authority and young audience of The Infatuation, now owned by JPMorgan Chase, with the Journal’s business reporting chops.
Another was “Inside Sports” (“title to change”), a “next generation reboot of ‘Real Sports’ for the sports-as-an-asset class era,” potentially helmed by Emmy-winning TV journalist Armen Keteyian.
The documents said the Journal had been “in negotiations” with The Infatuation and “in discussions” with Keteyian. Business Insider could not confirm the status of those discussions.
The last series listed in the docs was an AI show that aimed to get a big-name host.
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The Journal compared its plans to ‘The Daily’
In the docs, the Journal expressed big ambitions for a live morning news show, and said there had been “nothing new” in the category for a professional audience “in a decade.” The last entry on a timeline included in the planning docs was The New York Times’ “The Daily” in 2017, which has become a reliable top show on the podcast charts and one of the paper’s most successful launches.
“We see an opportunity to reinvent the category,” the documents said. The Journal also has its own daily news podcast, called “The Journal.”
Like the Times, the Journal is in a rare position in a challenged media environment to make a transformative investment. The Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., is profitable, helped by an early move to paywall its journalism.
The documents said that in its video push, the Journal aimed to produce 20 hours of video a week, expand to a free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) channel, and add subscription options and other formats as demand warranted. Between WSJ TV, existing video shows, licensed shows, and co-productions with creators, the Journal aspired to be an “always-on streaming channel.” The person familiar with the Journal’s strategy said those goals didn’t represent its current plans.
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Tucker took the helm at the Journal in 2023, moving from the Murdoch-owned UK Sunday Times with a plan to increase engagement with the Journal’s digital products. Digital subscriptions rose 8% to 4.5 million in the three months ended June 30 versus the year-ago period. She has called for more lively writing and enterprise reporting. The Journal had already begun to reorient its video strategy under its former head of video Maral Usefi. Under Usefi, the video team had grown by a third, to 65 people, as of April. She was succeeded by Samantha Henig, who was hired in July to lead a new multimedia team.
The docs said that with the Journal’s new effort, it aimed to combine its authority and scale with the personality of creator-led media and modern distribution. In terms of audience, it intended to reach a younger viewership than the traditional business TV audience and more decision-makers than creator-led media.
It projected reaching about 75 million viewers through Dow Jones’ social reach, upward of 5.6 million monthly watch hours by its 2028 fiscal year, and ad rates that were three to five times what business content on YouTube commands. The person familiar with the Journal’s strategy didn’t say if those figures represented its current ambitions.
The Journal made a big push into original video more than a decade ago, including the launch of video app WSJ Live in 2011 and expanding to episodic video doc series. Publishers overall have newly reprioritized video amid the rise of short-form content, YouTube’s increasing popularity on TV screens, and the success of new live shows like TBPN.
While embracing creator talent — and getting its own staff involved in video content — could help the Journal reach a younger audience, it comes with risks. Journalists who become on-camera talent can often command higher paydays, or defect to start their own ventures, like The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton did recently. Creators often have their own audiences, which give them leverage over a news organization that staff reporters might not have.
Flagship video shows are also expensive to produce, which makes high ad rates crucial to the Journal’s success with this slate. The internal docs explored pitching a variety of ways for advertisers to get involved, including as launch partners, with category-exclusive partnerships, and as “moment partners” tied to major news events like elections, earnings, and WSJ specials.
