The Wall Street Journal on Monday named Emma Tucker — a British journalist from the Sunday Times of London who is close with controlling shareholder Rupert Murdoch’s inner circle — as its new editor in chief, replacing Matt Murray, a Journal veteran who has led the paper for the past four and a half years.
Tucker, 56, will be the first woman to serve as top editor of the Journal in its 133-year history. News Corp, which oversees Murdoch’s publishing empire, said Murray will take on a new executive role at the company, reporting to CEO Robert Thomson after assisting Tucker through a one-month transition beginning Feb. 1.
The move signals a reassertion of control by Murdoch, who bought the Journal in 2007 and quickly took editorial command of the publication. Since then, Murray has been the only top editor to rise up through the ranks of the Journal; the others have been British editors brought over from other Murdoch titles.
During Murray’s tenure, the Journal won the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting in 2019 and produced significant series such as the “Facebook Files” and an investigation into the financial conflicts of interest among federal judges. Digital-only subscriptions to the Journal doubled, growing from approximately 1.6 million as of June 2018 to nearly 3.2 million as of the quarter ending September.
His appointment to the top job in 2018, after nearly a quarter century at the paper, quelled significant staff dissatisfaction with his predecessor Gerald Baker, a British journalist who among his various roles had previously written conservative commentary — describing himself as a “right-wing curmudgeon” — and was perceived by many staffers as overly friendly toward then-president Donald Trump.
On Monday, Thomson praised Murray as a “superb journalist and leader who has overseen a peerless editorial team that fashioned success for the Journal during an era of extreme vulnerability for media companies and journalism.”
Since January 2020, Tucker has served as editor of the Sunday Times which she joined in 2007. She had previously worked alongside Thomson at the Financial Times, where he was an editor. Her candidacy for the Journal post also got a boost from Rebekah Brooks, who oversees News Corp’s British arm, which includes the Times of London and the Sunday Times, as well as the Sun tabloid.
Under Tucker’s editorship, the Sunday Times was named Sunday Newspaper of the Year at the UK Press Awards and oversaw a more than 40 percent increase in digital subscriptions to 450,000 by September 2022, up from 320,000 at the end of 2019.
Thomson praised Tucker as someone whose “global vision and experience will be particularly important at a time of immense international opportunity” for the Journal.
The move comes as the two companies under the Murdoch family’s control — Dow Jones and Fox Corp — are exploring a recombination. The entities split in 2012 after the phone-hacking scandal at Murdoch’s British tabloids.