All posts tagged: Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal story on Trump and Epstein took six months and 20 staff

Wall Street Journal story on Trump and Epstein took six months and 20 staff

Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker and Mill Media founder Joshi Herrmann both appearing at Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit in London on 6 May 2026. Pictures: Reuters/Chris J Ratcliffe Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker has said her team “ran towards the fire” with their reporting linking Donald Trump to Epstein’s birthday book – but that “at least” his legal threat came after publication and not before. Trump attempted to claim $10bn in damages over reporting that said he had sent a bawdy birthday card to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The lawsuit was dismissed in April as a judge found he had not proved the WSJ had acted with actual malice as required under US defamation law. Speaking at Truth Tellers, The Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit in London on Wednesday, Tucker joked that the story had caused “a whole world of pain”. She said: “It’s a really good example of why the kind of journalism that we’re all endeavouring to keep alive and focus on is challenged, because it took an …

WSJ victory over Trump means his BBC lawsuit likely to fail

WSJ victory over Trump means his BBC lawsuit likely to fail

Donald Trump’s alleged birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein The Wall Street Journal’s legal victory over President Trump upholds the long-standing principle that US defamation claimants must prove actual malice. It raises the likelihood that a $10bn lawsuit filed against the BBC by the US president will also fail. Under the US First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, defamation claims have traditionally been much harder to pursue in America than the UK. But Trump has sought to upend this precedent with a flurry of claims against the media. He sued The Wall Street Journal for $10bn over a 17 January 2025 article, which reported claims Trump sent a bawdy birthday card to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Now a Florida district court has thrown out Trump’s claim in a resounding victory for the Rupert Murdoch-owned publisher. Trump is separately suing the BBC over misleading editing in a documentary about the president. Unless he can also prove malice in this case, it will also be thrown out. Trump’s request for legal fees against the Journal was also …

Wall Street Journal video team recentres around ‘journalism that’s worth paying for’

Wall Street Journal video team recentres around ‘journalism that’s worth paying for’

Maral Usefi, Wall Street Journal head of video. Picture: News Corp The Wall Street Journal has revamped its video strategy around the central aim of making “video journalism that’s worth paying for”. The strategy has six pillars: original/investigative journalism, breaking news, topical explainers and analysis of the news, strategic live video around a major news event, habit-building franchises, and IP-based scripted and unscripted projects via WSJ Studios. The WSJ hired Maral Usefi, former vice president of news and editorial operations at Vice Media, as head of video in September. Since then the video team has grown by a third to 65 people. Usefi was tasked with developing a video strategy that would complement editor-in-chief Emma Tucker’s overall “audience-first” vision that would bring in new subscribers and get them to engage with the brand as much as possible. [Read more: WSJ editor Emma Tucker on how title grew digital subs by a third to 4.3m] Previously the WSJ was mainly focused on off-platform video revenue via the likes of Youtube and Linkedin. “Everything was optimised for …

WSJ subscriptions success ‘not luck’ says editor Emma Tucker

WSJ subscriptions success ‘not luck’ says editor Emma Tucker

Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker. Picture: News Corp The Wall Street Journal’s recent run of subscriptions growth is not down to an accident or luck, editor-in-chief Emma Tucker has made clear. Digital-only subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal have grown by 30% to 4.29 million since the start of 2023, when Tucker joined as editor from fellow News Corp title The Sunday Times. Overall subscriptions (including print) have increased by 20% to 4.68 million. Dow Jones, of which The Wall Street Journal is a key part, expects to reach $1bn profit within five years (it had EBITDA profit of $588m in the year ending 30 June 2025). Dow Jones is the fastest-growing segment within News Corp. Tucker set out a strategy to the newsroom when she arrived in New York three years ago, based around giving audiences the “new, distinctive, useful, compelling, relevant journalism” they needed. “I asked the newsroom to get behind that strategy,” she told Press Gazette. “I also made structural changes to the newsroom to enable it to get behind that …

US newspaper circulations 2025: Washington Post print declines 21% in a year

US newspaper circulations 2025: Washington Post print declines 21% in a year

New York newspapers report on the previous night’s invasion of Ukraine by Russian military forces. Picture: rblfmr/Shutterstock The combined average daily print circulation at 25 of the largest audited newspapers in the US fell by 12.5% in the year to the end of September 2025, according to new data from Alliance for Audited Media (AAM). Figures supplied exclusively to Press Gazette show that only one title among the top 25 by combined print and digital circulations saw a rise in print circulation year on year. However, AAM has flagged that its circulation data does not include all digital newspaper subscriptions, and the non-profit organisation rolled out new digital reporting rules in February 2026. [Read more: Alliance for Audited Media to modernise publisher digital circulation reporting] The largest year-on-year decline was at The Washington Post, which saw its average daily print circulation down by 21.2% to 87,576 in the six months to 30 September 2025, from 111,171 a year earlier. During this period, the paper saw “significant subscription cancellations”, alongside the Los Angeles Times, after its …

Biggest subscription news websites 2026: Exclusive ranking

Biggest subscription news websites 2026: Exclusive ranking

Digital subscriptions pages or homepages for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Zealand Herald, Mail+ and Apple News+, all screenshotted on 5 March 2026 New entrants on Press Gazette’s 100k Club ranking of the biggest subscription news websites in the world include in 2026 include The Irish Times Group, Goalhanger and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Press Gazette’s 100k Club ranks English-language publishers with at least 100,000 paying digital subscribers. Fifty-nine news and magazine publishers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India appear on the list. Scroll down or click here for the full ranking. This compares with just 24 titles making the grade as members of the 100k Club when Press Gazette launched this ranking in 2020. The New York Times (12.21 million digital subscribers, up 13% year on year – but some are only non-news products) makes up 23% of the subscriptions on the entire list of 59 publishers. Substack now has more than five million paying subscribers to publications on its platform (from whom it …

News Corp CEO warns AIs scraping without paying: ‘We’re coming for you’

News Corp CEO warns AIs scraping without paying: ‘We’re coming for you’

Robert Thomson. Picture: News UK News Corp CEO Robert Thomson has warned AI companies scraping the publisher’s websites without paying that “if you’re stealing our stuff we are going to sue you”. Meta will pay News Corp up to $50m per year for at least three years under a new licensing deal that will see the Facebook owner allowed to use the publisher’s news and archive content from the US and UK in its AI products. News Corp’s deal with OpenAI announced in May 2024 was worth a similar amount: more than $250m over five years. News Corp is currently suing Perplexity and, as the owner of book publisher Harper Collins, was involved in a class action piracy lawsuit by authors against Anthropic that has resulted in a $1.5bn settlement. Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco on Monday, Thomson said News Corp (which owns The Times, The Sun, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Australian and many more titles) has a “woo and a sue …

Perplexity claims News Corp tried to ‘entrap’ its AI chatbot

Perplexity claims News Corp tried to ‘entrap’ its AI chatbot

Perplexity response to question about original Wall Street Journal reporting (query posed on 2 March 2026, sources no longer include Wall Street Journal) Perplexity has accused Dow Jones and the New York Post of carrying out a fishing exercise and “entrapment” by attempting to encourage its AI chatbot to spit out verbatim copies of its articles to back up their copyright claim. Perplexity wrote to a New York judge last week arguing the News Corp subsidiaries should be forced to hand over records showing the hundreds of queries they made to “fish” for a basis to sue within its AI search tool before launching the claim in October 2024. Perplexity told Judge Katherine Failla: “This discovery would reveal an inconvenient truth: Plaintiffs repeatedly and deceptively crossed the line from investigation to entrapment.” Perplexity is arguing that the publishers have no privilege over the information shared in its search tool because it was entered into its platform with the intention to sue. News Corp subsidiaries Dow Jones (which publishes the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Group) …

Wall Street Journal Condemns Trump’s Tariff Tantrum Against SCOTUS

Wall Street Journal Condemns Trump’s Tariff Tantrum Against SCOTUS

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board denounced US President Donald Trump’s reaction to the Supreme Court restricting his ability to impose tariffs on Friday night, stating that the president “owes” an apology “to the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself.” “Mr. Trump doubtless won’t offer one, but his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency,” the board wrote in an editorial headlined “Trump Demeans Himself as He Attacks the Supreme Court”. In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court struck down most of the “emergency” tariffs Trump tried to implement, finding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorise the president to impose them. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh dissented. Following the court’s decision, Trump raged against the justices who ruled against him, calling them a “disgrace” and calling their decision an “embarrassment to their families.” “Others think they’re being politically correct, which has happened before far too often with certain members of this court,” …

News subscriptions prices and offers tracked in 2026

News subscriptions prices and offers tracked in 2026

Subscriptions pages for the Financial Times, The Telegraph, The Scotsman and Bloomberg Media on 23 January 2026 Digital news subscriptions prices have increased by an average of 3% in the UK for the second year running, according to Press Gazette analysis. However many publications were offering discounts in January of up to 89%, indicating that many consumers may be able to avoid paying the full price. Of 23 publications included in Press Gazette’s dataset both in January 2025 and January 2026, ten increased their annual digital subscription prices in the past year. Six saw no change in annual price and seven reduced the cost of their digital subscription. As a result the average percentage change among these 23 digital news subscriptions was 3%, close to the UK inflation rate of 3.6% (2.7% in the US) over the past 12 months. This contrasts to UK national newspaper cover prices, which were up by an average of 10% in the past year as publishers look to make up for falling newsstand sales and advertising. From January 2024 …