When people are asked to describe a typical reader of The Wall Street Journal, they are likely to say it’s an older man who works in business or finance – or perhaps he used to but is now retired. That description is not totally off base – the average WSJ subscriber is pushing 60 – but it also doesn’t provide a more detailed picture of the types of people that regularly consume WSJ’s articles, podcasts and videos.

For WSJ, that has become a central question to find answers for ever since its new leadership team, led by editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, arrived in early 2023. It also has taken on even greater importance as search and social traffic has plummeted, forcing publications big and small to develop a more direct relationship and understanding of its audiences.

The WSJ adopted audience personas to break down its most valuable audience segments into five groups:

At the center of WSJ’s personas-based strategy is an audience dashboard it built in-house, which was rolled out across its newsroom last October. Today, everyone within the newsroom has access to the dashboard, which scores every story on a scale from 1-5 on how it performed in reaching the five personas. It replaces raw pageview tracking with the internal engagement curve, which evaluates actual time spent versus expected time spent based on content category and word count.

The Journal scores stories from one to five across four measures: