I have thoughts on Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas, but they’ll need to wait until Thursday. In non-papal affairs, a few things to know:
The question for publishers is simple: How do they adopt AI tools to drive efficiency and growth while maintaining audience trust that’s already eroded? In collaboration with WordPress VIP, The Rebooting is conducting research into how publishers are navigating the Great AI Transition. Take the survey.
The AI conversation is moving from chatbots to agents. Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk joined me last week in a TRB Expert Session to break down how Beehiiv has rolled out an MCP, a tool that lets people manage their analytics and growth through Claude or another AI platform. This is an important software shift as users will access services how they want, usually in natural language, rather than logging in to many systems and navigating various dashboards. See the replay.
The gap between strategy and execution is front and center with audience data. Omeda vp of client experience Tony Napoleone joined me for a TRB Expert Session to expand on the key findings of Omeda’s latest State of Audience report, which found that 70% of publishers reported audience data is critical yet only 9% said their organizations effectively use audience data to take actions. See the replay
This week, I spoke to Scott Havens, chief growth officer of Dow Jones, about his remit at the publisher, which compared to its peers has an enviable market position and set of assets. One thing Scott was clear about: He wants to build new things, not just optimize the portfolio.
TechCrunch has long been known for newsletters like Mobility and StrictlyVC, but behind the scenes, slow workflows imposed by rigid tools held them back. After moving to beehiiv, everything changed, Mobility grew 14% in two months, StrictlyVC grew 4%, and editors could publish faster, experiment freely, and cut through dev bottlenecks. Cleaner segmentation improved deliverability and analytics, while new revenue levers, from sponsorships to paid options, opened up. With beehiiv, TechCrunch quickly turned its newsletters into a smarter engine for reach, retention, and revenue.
"It’s about building something new”
In the wreckage of the scale era, The Wall Street Journal is one of the winners. It has 4.5 million paid subscriptions and the broader Dow Jones portfolio has 6.3 million with a collection of B2B data assets like OPIS and Risk & Compliance. The Journal has more pep under the editorial leadership of Emma Tucker.
Scott Havens, a veteran of leadership positions at Bloomberg Media, The Atlantic, Time, joined at the start of the year as the chief growth officer of Dow Jones and global head of consumer. Scott joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss where those growth opportunities lie.
"Since I left business school and got into digital in the late 90s, it was always about building something new,” Scott tole me. “ The pathway for media growth usually is launching new things. You can always optimize your current stuff, but I've seen success from putting new things into the market, exploring new areas for audiences and for sponsors."
B2B/B2C integration. Dow Jones isn’t a Bloomberg model, but it has data assets that have better economics than news media, even news media focused on business and finance. But integrating B2B and B2C assets is fraught. Scott wants to build more links between Dow Jones’ consumer assets (WSJ, Marketwatch, IBD, Barron’s) with the professional information business (Risk & Compliance, Energy/OPIS, Factiva). B2B data is popping up more in the consumer-facing publications. Barron’s has rolled out a new subscription newsletter that uses risk and energy data. Dow Jones Risk Journal leverages reporting across the Dow Jones consumer portfolio along to complement a dedicated newsroom.
"I don't like B2B and B2C as binary labels," Scott said. “Investors who are ‘B2C’ are really valuing and paying a lot for the data and analysis that's coming out of our B2B verticals."
Niching down. Publishers are looking to get more niche. Scott, who came to Dow Jones from a stint as president of the New York Mets, is moving into the business of sports. The data shows the overlap, and sports has become an attractive asset class, as leagues open up to private equity investments and teams become strategic assets for real estate, media and other business lines. Sports are also generally thought to be an AI hedge, since robot basketball is yet to be as compelling as the human version. The initiative is kicking off with an invite-only Wall Street Journal summit called "The Next Sports Economy" in July, targeting roughly 150 owners, investors, and operators. The franchise will be more than an event, he said. Scott said consumer data would be the guide for new opportunities.
“We know [subscribers] love sports. We know that they're interested in AI and tech. We know that they're interested in longevity,” he said.
AI as distribution partner. On AI, Dow Jones parent company News Corp has AI licensing deals with OpenAI, Bloomberg, Microsoft and Meta. It is in litigation with Perplexity. This is part of what News Corp CEO Robert Thomson calls a “woo and sue” approach. Bringing Factiva data to LLMs is an opportunity, and Scott could see a scenario where the Journal is available through an AI interface.
"If they're not coming to you, would you rather have them through a third party? We do this with Apple and Google. So yeah, there's ideal and then there's being scrappy and trying to find new. I see a world where potentially if consumers suggest they want this, you might be able to read the Journal through OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever.
Creator deals. The Wall Street Journal fumbled an early creator opportunity when it let Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg walk out of the building. The duo had built the All Things D franchise, with a power event and popular blog, that was an early forerunner of the journalistic creator economy. They split to build Recode, which was acquired by Vox. Kara Swisher with Scott Galloway now front one of Vox’s marquee assets that attracted James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems to buy Vox. More recently, the Journal’s personal technology columnist, Joanna Stern, departed to start her own video-based brand, New Things. Scott is focused on finding the new talent deals that will enable Dow Jones brands to strike talent deals that are not a typical employer-employee relationship. It is also developing internal talent through the WSJ’s Talent Lab. Scott’s bet: The creator economy is overheated, and there are too many creators chasing too few deals in a noisy environment that will only increase the quality signal of a brand like the Journal.
“We're cresting with the creator movement and we all know how some of the story ends,” he said. “Some of them are going to either be institutionalized, sell out at the top and become part of an institution. That would be wise if money is a goal. Some are going to get exhausted from doing everything and decide I want to take this into a place like Puck or us or somewhere else. And some are going to give up because they're not in the top 5-10%, and the money is getting harder and harder to get from both sponsors and from subscribers."
Fewer, bigger events. Publishers have events fever. Dow Jones over 200 per year. Scott is not enthusiastic about built-if-bought small dollar breakfast or dinner events that generate $50,000. Those are fine for an individual but don’t do much for a company at the scale of Dow Jones. Instead, he wants to focus less on small ball and more on the best performers in the portfolio to make high-value events that function as deal-making convening platforms while generating newsmaking content.
“We need to do less, but do them more impactfully and at bigger scale,” Scott said. “I do think we're saturated. I do think there is fatigue on the speaker side, the sponsor side, the attendee side."
This week, we discuss why college grads are booing AI not because of bad marketing — it has been bad, let’s be real — but because, in Troy’s words, “there’s nothing in it for them.” Right now, the AI revolution promises lots of power and riches for a small group of people and the rest are left with the specter job loss, data center sprawl and perhaps existential doom. That’s a product issue. Meanwhile AI flubs continue to pile up and point to serious issues as these models are used for more than shortcuts to writing a book or essay, or create an animated gorilla to rack up YouTube ad revenue. We also unpack the fallout from Google pulling the plug on the 10 blue links era for a fully AI-ified search experience that will accelerate the timeline for Google Zero and the rush to harvesting strategies like licensing or, in the case of BuzzFeed, acting as the front for Local Now. Anonymous Banker joins to break down James Murdoch’s deal for Vox Media. Plus: the rise of the supernatural, using legacy media brands to find the transactional end point, and what we can learn from how Hadrian handled business and personal affairs at the helm of a far-flung empire.
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