Confider #82: WSJ Boss’ New Vision; Mark Halperin’s Pay Day

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EXCLUSIVE — TUCKER’S TAKEAWAY: Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker has outlined her vision for the paper following the completion of a months-long content review, Confider has learned. Tucker, who joined the Journal from the Sunday Times in London in February, addressed the newsroom at a recent all-hands meeting to detail her “audience first” strategy and emphasize the need for the writing in the Journal to be more engaging. “Our review found that the most powerful thing we can achieve in the newsroom is to better engage readers with our digital products with a view to reducing churn,” Tucker emailed staff following the Sept. 21 meeting. “Specifically, we will think more deeply about journalism that brings readers back to our digital products more often and has them reading more while they’re with us.” The “audience first” strategy is guided by a set of principles that instructs staff to ask at the start of every story who the target audience is, what they want to know, how might the Journal broaden its audience, and what format is best for telling that story. According to multiple people who attended the meeting, Tucker wants to broaden coverage areas of the Journal in the hopes of attracting a younger readership (the average age of a WSJ reader is currently 59). In March, Confider first reported that Tucker was eager to move the paper away from commodity news in favor of enterprise journalism and that she intended to slash the paper’s laborious page-one process. The Brit is expected to streamline the paper’s Standards process, which is known for having an outsized role and at times slowing down the publication of stories. “We will work harder to always bring ‘the WSJ angle’ to every story; go deep over broad; unique over commodity; and be faster while we do it. We will also be making efforts to make our writing more accessible, while retaining our rigorous standards,” she wrote to staff. But one Journal staffer told Confider, “there are a lot of people on edge in the newsroom waiting for what comes next,” adding that they and many of their colleagues fear there will be a round of layoffs now that the content review is complete. Meanwhile, the paper’s D.C. bureau is struggling to contain a mouse infestation that several staffers have complained to management about. “There are mice running around the office nonstop,” one political reporter told Confider. A rep for the Journal declined to comment.

EXCLUSIVE — WITH ALL DUE RESPECT: Earlier this summer, Confider reported on the comeback attempts of some of the powerful media men who were taken down by the #MeToo era. One of those men we highlighted was Mark Halperin, the former NBC News political star who was fired after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct, allegations he’s long denied. At the time, we noted that after attempts to rehab his mainstream media career failed, Halperin has been stuck working for Fox News wannabe Newsmax, the MAGA channel notorious for giving accused creeps a second life. But Halperin isn’t just satisfied with making near-daily appearances as the right-wing propaganda network’s in-house political analyst. The Game Change author, who launched his Wide World of News blog on Substack in 2019, announced to his subscribers in June that they would only be able to receive his daily newsletter if they signed up for two very pricey “concierge” packages. The two membership “tiers,” labeled Mario and Luigi, cost between $3,360 to $4,800 annually. Both tiers include access to the newsletter, “breaking news emails” and Zooms and two email replies from Halperin a month. However, the more expensive “Mario” package also includes access to Halperin’s focus groups, two private Zoom calls per year, and monthly “salon conversations” over Zoom. Acknowledging how “admittedly expensive” these packages are, Halperin justified the expense because of how much his readers are spending on other services. “Many organizations and individuals (including some of you) pay monthly fees to consultants who charge as much as one hundred times the cost of my new service,” he wrote. It would appear that Halperin is trying to resuscitate the glory days of his time as political director at ABC News, where he served as the editor and main voice of the Beltway newsletter The Note until 2007. If any of our readers have been willing to pay nearly $5,000 a year to read Halperin and chat with him on Zoom, or know someone who has, we’d love to hear from you. Halperin did not respond to a request for comment.

Read more at The Daily Beast.