As CEO of Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial group, Almar Latour (Welten, Netherlands; 54 years old) directs one of the most influential informational platforms on the planet. At the moment, it’s at the center of the kind of storm that can threaten a media company’s total destruction. After the paper’s publication of a letter sent by Donald Trump to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the U.S. president is suing. The official response from Dow Jones, which is also part of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, has been to assert its ample trust in the “rigor and accuracy” of its coverage, and to venture that it will energetically defend itself against any lawsuit. Latour’s strategy is consistent across all kinds of situations: avoid losing one’s composure. A journalist by training, he wasn’t born in the United States, but he understands the country better than most who were. Today, the young man who set out from the Netherlands is reminiscent of John Wayne’s character in The Quiet Man. “Stay calm” has been his response not just to interview questions, but also to his career’s most difficult moments.
Latour joined the Journal in 1995 as a news assistant in Washington, later spending time at the publication’s London bureau and its New York City headquarters. In 2007, he led its first technology team and the paper’s digital transformation to an online subscription model. On July 21, 2020, more than 280 editors sent him a letter about the “lack of fact-checking and transparency” in the op-ed section, protesting the inclusion of information that contradicted the work of editorial staff. The episode shook the newspaper like never before. Latour and his calm demeanor turned that critical moment into a turning point in which internal measures were implemented to more clearly differentiate between news and opinion.
In his office, a pile of newspaper copies are stacked next to a window, like a trophy. They are the issues that were published during the 491 days that journalist Evan Gershkovich was imprisoned by the Russians after covering the war in Ukraine. Though a year has passed since Gershkovich was set free, Latour’s voice still breaks when he recalls the moment. Today, The Wall Street Journal, with more than four million subscribers, exists among all the challenges and uncertainties facing journalism around the world. This interview, which took place before Trump sued the Journal, is a break from Latour’s daily grind, a conversation with a humble and calm man who says that his dream headline would be that there is life on Mars.
Question. What remains of that young man who left the Netherlands for the United States?
Answer. Welton is a tiny little village with a church and main street and a lot of green. It is still very much in my heart, it never really left me. I think I got a lot of my passions from there, starting from a very young age. My mom got me a subscription to two newspapers, one local and one national, and I remember just devouring news. That passion is still there. I always had my gaze on the wider world. My mother was born in Indonesia, my grandfather lived in the United States, my great-grandfather lived in the United States, so I was always passionate about the country. We had the first computer on our block. I was very much into technology — I’m still very much into technology, and the throughlines on the big things of life. I feel that boy would still very much recognize me, and I think we’d have a good time talking.
Q. And how did your parents react when you left Europe?
A. I’ve been talking about the United States since a very young age. Even in grade school, I did papers on Lincoln and Disney. So, this obsession was no surprise to them. I said very early on that I wanted to go do this. They were incredibly supportive for me to go there for a gap year. But then, I’m still in that gap year today. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t even a conscious decision for the long-term. I took things as they came. I think the one thing I left behind when I left my beloved Holland was predictability.
Q. Do you still feel that you’re an immigrant?
A. I have lived in so many places around the world that I know what it’s like to not be from a place. I’ve been a guest in many different countries, and it comes with a level of humility around the language, the culture.
Q. You remember the feeling of vulnerability?
A. 100%. I made one of the most important decisions just moments after I arrived in the United States. I was coming here for a gap year, as I told you. And we got off the bus and they said, “There’s the dorm for international students and there’s the dorm for Americans. You’re international, you’re going there.” I went to the leader of the group, the professor, and I said, “Actually, I’m not going to stay in the international dorm. I came to America, I want to be in America.” What that meant was that I was going to be surrounded for the rest of that year by people who spoke faster, who had a vocabulary that was different. I had to really catch up, because in Holland, I loved to write. I was good at it, so I could express myself in a sophisticated way. And all of a sudden, you’re reduced to someone who has to get help in explaining the most basic things. I think that is an amazing learning school. After that year, I figured I could actually function in the English language, and that just gave me a whole new world that opened up. But also, humility. It’s how I function really well as a journalist or as a business leader or in policy, I ask the questions until I get the answers, and also understand and recognize when you are not there yet. I still get a lot of energy from that.
Q. Are you still a journalist, or are you a CEO?
A. My job is CEO, a businessman, which obviously stretches beyond journalism. But it’s very much about reliable information, reliable data. I describe my specific job as practicing journalism with different means. You might call me a product CEO, somebody who is making the product and then leading the company. I am still involved when there are big ethical questions, where we prioritize our investments, which editors we choose to run our publications. Every morning, I spend several hours devouring information and news. The curiosity of a journalist, I think, is a big driving force for me as a business leader.
Q. How do you manage a balance between corporate power and the job (and concerns) of the Journal’s youngest journalists?
A. I manage in part by walking around and making sure that I’m in touch with people across the company. I particularly like when people are new. I always ask them to come back in a week’s time and tell me what is absurd about our company and what is inspiring. I started as an intern and was in the mailroom after that. I delivered mail to people that I still know today. That’s where you actually get to know humans, personalities, and understand who is kind and who is not.
Q. Dow Jones’ business numbers are staggering.
A. Dow Jones has achieved $575 million in quarterly revenue, driven by an increase in circulation revenue and growth in the professional information business, with an 11% increase in Risk & Compliance and 10% in Dow Jones Energy. During the last quarter, consumer products exceeded six million subscriptions.
Q. Which phone calls are harder: those in regards to what is published in the Journal or the ones about Dow Jones’ business?
A. I’m calm by nature and I don’t subscribe to hysteria. I try to be as analytical and pragmatic as possible. There’s a clear protocol for how to deal with some of these things.
Q. How do you manage the relationship with U.S. presidents, the previous one and the current one?
A. What I watch for is to make sure that, in an era in which discourse clearly has changed in America and around the world, we keep a cool head and our journalists remain unbiased.
Q. What was the most difficult part of the year in which Evan Gershkovich was detained by Russia?
A. Seeing his parents was terrible. As a parent myself, I could see that this was the unimaginable. Being aware of how they were feeling was a big propeller for having the energy and the drive to push this campaign to free him. The other thing was an echo from my past, that I had seen my colleague Daniel Pearl kidnapped in the early 2000s and lose his life at the hands of Islamic extremists in Karachi, Pakistan. He was investigating ties between terrorists when he was captured. His death was filmed and used as propaganda. I knew him. How that tragedy played out was the first thing on my mind when I got the phone call that Evan had been incarcerated by the Russian regime. I realized that these things don’t always end well. But again, calm is my modus operandi. I tried to break the problem down into many smaller problems that we could put teams and efforts against. For a year and a half, I hardly thought about anything else.
Q. How did you keep public (and political) attention on Gershkovich’s case so that he wouldn’t be forgotten?
A. It was a conscious decision to make sure that we would be loud about it. It was not just Evan’s problem or The Wall Street Journal’s problem, this is something that’s happening to journalism around the world. Then the Russian authorities put out a press release about it, so we didn’t have a choice at that point to be quiet. We had to stand up for principles and push hard. To this day — Evan is, of course, back, pushing for press freedom as part of this institution, even more so that we were before.
Q. When did you find out Gershkovich was going to be set free?
A. He was finally liberated on August 1, 2024 in a prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia, in the Ankara, Turkey airport. A number of weeks before he was actually released, we knew that the negotiations were serious and the government said they wanted us to be quieter. We had come close before, so I still tried to be calm and hopeful, but also realistic that it might not happen. I do remember the day that Evan was going to fly back, his parents and I had breakfast in Washington before we drove them to the White House. It was very joyful, but we still sort of couldn’t believe it. And then I remember taking them into this big black SUV and dropping them off and they got to speak to Evan on the phone. That was one of the happiest moments of my life. Then later that night, he was on the tarmac after he hugged his mom and his family, he came to the crowd and he said, “Oh Almar, my mom has written a lot about you.” We had never met each other, and I needed to know nothing more than that.
Q. What keeps you up at night now?
A. The rapid rise of AI is already changing the information ecosystem. The user experience, how people connect with technology and information, the business models, the way advertising works. I recently saw numerous “articles from The Wall Street Journal” that were fake, clearly done by Russian sympathizers that looked exactly like ours, down to the subscription button. What I’m pushing for the most is that you have to have reliable information at the core and if you can couple that with a better way to present it, that could be a winning formula. In the end, I believe that journalism could see a renaissance.
Q. Are you afraid that technology will replace journalists?
A. Deciding between technology and people is a bit of a false choice. We have to invest in humans and in their skill set, but we may have to redirect it. AI can also be used as an amazing tool. If you look at some of our best journalism, it’s data and reporting coming together. We call that “authentic intelligence,” where the human steers. We are living an exciting but anxiety-inducing moment in geopolitics. In the end, I am a strategic optimist. We have invested in smart reporters and researchers all over the world, but they work with technology. That gives me great hope, and also great inspiration.
Q. Why don’t you write more articles?
A. I just wrote a piece called “Brand America Never Goes Out of Style” that attempts to express how, even faced with internal and external challenges, the “American dream” is still alive: the promise of opportunities, of making the impossible a reality and, above all, reinventing itself when it’s least expected. But I never was a fan of bosses competing with their former colleagues.
Q. Is that why you don’t post on X anymore?
A. Sort of the same thing. One thing that is core to my job is that I cannot be political. I have to avoid a forum where you can get quickly into a political back-and-forth, because that is not how I contribute. Maybe when the time is right, I will weigh in. But that is not now.
Q. What headline would you most like to see in The Wall Street Journal?
A. That’s an intriguing question. That there’s life on Mars.
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