Q&A with Louise Story, Chief News Strategist and Chief Product & Technology Officer, The Wall Street Journal
Louise was first at The Journal as a summer reporting intern, before finishing up business school and spending the next 12 years at The New York Times. She returned to The Journal a year and a half ago. The Idea caught up with Louise to learn more about the recent launch of WSJ Money and WSJ Jobs as well as The Journal’s approach to new product development more generally. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
The Journal has announced several products in the last few weeks, including WSJ Money and WSJ Calendars. What was the impetus behind either of those initiatives? More generally, what is The Journal’s approach to new product development?
I run a big group at the Journal that we call DXS, which stands for digital experiences and strategy. We’re really the connective glue amongst a lot of different parties at The Journal, working in all parts of building out new things: the content strategy as well as the design and the engineering of them. We’re very integrated into the content — if you make a new story format, like the catch-up module we made a few months ago, it means having different content types.
The DXS unit is structured into five groups for the different phases of product development: insights into our users, content experiences, audience touchpoints, audience groups, and the programming strategy. We announced that structure in December to really have a user-focused approach to product development.
One of the big things we’re trying to change at The Journal and I think making a lot of headway on is helping everyone who works in different disciplines get to the table at the beginning, work together, and understand each other’s language. For example, one part of the company was thinking about members, another was thinking about audiences, some about customers, and product designers and engineers talk about the users. Even though there are different words for it, we’re all talking about the same people. Instead of saying the audience or the members or the users, we just say the MACU to acknowledge all of our different disciplines and how we’re working together.
That’s the big picture. In terms of the calendars — that idea actually came through our Idea Portal, which is something we introduced in the fall of 2018. It is an open process for innovation where anyone can put an idea, we look at the ideas and we try to use them. The idea there, which came from Brian Fitzgerald who now works on our Apple News team, was why can’t you be where the users are? A lot of people spend time in their calendar, looking at what meetings to go to next, so if we could put content in there, maybe it would be helpful. We started at first with our economics coverage and we’ve also done an election one, and we have some other ones coming. There’s been good engagement in it because again, we’re following the audience.
WSJ Money really came from our audience groups. We are trying to make sure that we make content that is accessible to very broad audiences, even people who may not be able to pay for The Journal right now, just to be helpful to them. That project, which Ebony Reed, our New Audiences Chief led, looked at what kind of financial information is needed by people who, in this time period, might not have a lot of money.
It’s not about how to invest all the money you have. It’s really practical information. Because we did that site as a public service, it’s free. It’s really designed for mobile-first, and it was really exciting to think about how to make this really useful for people on mobile. That’s why we made the text easily share-able. From user research, we see people tap and push down. We also designed the page so that every write-up in it, you could just share the text out. You’re not even sharing a link to drive people back to the site. We’re just trying to help people and let you share the text.
We have another site called WSJ Jobs, which similarly aims to provide helpful information to people and is in the same free, easily shareable mobile-first format.
The Journal developed several new tools for the upcoming elections. Can you talk a little bit about what that process was like and then what it was like adapting those tools to pandemic coverage?
We did a bunch of user research last summer about what people were looking for from the election and we found they were looking to get caught up quickly on it. They were also looking for original information — what do candidates actually say about things? We took those audience MACU user needs and developed product features that would address those. So, the catch-up module is something where you can click through very quickly and get caught up on what’s happened that day. The live Q&A tool that we’ve created pairs live video with real-time Q&A with the audience. We also made a lot of improvements to our live coverage page, which we use all the time on different election nights.
We found that all three of those were immediately useful and important for coronavirus coverage. We’ve used catch-up modules, we’ve done numerous live Q&As with everyone from our reporters to Governor Phil Murphy to science experts. As for live coverage, we’re still doing a live coverage blog on coronavirus and the improvements we made really helped.
What’s great when you follow what your audience needs are and you come with news experiences that address those needs, they’re generally going to go across other topic areas.
The Journal has invested resources into engaging audiences, particularly around commenting. What is the reason for that emphasis and how has that borne out?
When we look at new things we might do, we think about whether this is going to attract new audiences and bring in new people to introduce them to what we do or if it’s going to help us engage with people who are already here, or both.
Focusing in on our audience comment experience was really important because The Journal spends a lot of time and care on every single word on our website or on our mobile app. If you think about it, our audience is posting a huge number of words on our platforms. Before we revamped there, there hadn’t been so much focus on how that connected with our journalism. That’s been a big success because even though we put some restrictions in place — for example, we don’t have comments on every single article every day and instead mostly on ones that have the most visitors — most times you will find that the audience conversation box is open. We found that people who come to a story now are more likely to open and read the audience conversation or reply to a post. It’s become more appealing to a broader set of people to become a little bit more balanced, a little bit younger set of people.
To include and engage the audience, you actually have to put work and effort into it. We not only put real product and tech work into it, but we also expanded our audience voice team where we’ve got reporters who are very interested in interacting with the audience and also creating stories around things the audience posts.
The audience voice team also works with journalists throughout our whole newsroom to help on call outs. We’ve been doing a lot more call outs where we’ll put a form to solicit feedback from the audience and audiences come in with many different anecdotes and tips and pointers that would become great stories. Joanna Stern, for example, did an audio call out where people could call in and leave comments and things and then she used the audio.
What else are you working on that you’re excited about?
We’re going to be launching a digital magazine [WSJ Noted] that will focus on being accessible and relevant to people under 34. It’s a place that we can also experiment and find more about The Journal’s future by seeing what really resonates with younger audiences. We have a very large audience of people who are in universities and who can connect with even more.
Other things that are going on range from looking at how our mobile app works to navigation to the way we distribute content. Matt announced last December that we’d be undertaking a content review, on which I’m knee-deep working with a team of really talented strategy editors. That’s looking at what we publish and what we write about and how we do it. It’s really an acknowledgement of how we’re approaching things at The Journal, which is looking across everything, no silos.
Ultimately, our product is our news, our product is having the world’s best news experiences. That includes every element of it: the stories, the way the platforms work. So, the content review will be something also where we’re pinpointing so many of the things we do that are great and also other areas that we can explore.
Because, yes, we’re not a newspaper company. We’re a digital growth company. That’s been at the core of a lot of what we’re doing, focusing on how to bring our journalism to more and more people.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media from an organization that is not your own?
Something I saw recently that was interesting — which I don’t think necessarily has a use case with us — is trying to fund journalism through music on Spotify. It has gotten people around the world to make songs connected thematically to the journalism project where they could raise money to then use for the journalism. It’s a model I’ve not seen before and it’s really just defined to one particular journalism project, but I thought it was interesting.
Rapid Fire Questions
What is your first read in the morning?
The Wall Street Journal.
What is the last book you read?
A Year with Rumi.
What would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role, whether within media or completely outside of it?
I spent the majority of my career as an investigative reporter. So, if I were not in my current role, I think I’d be reporting out a big investigation that might run on a digital news site or be a film.
