Almar Latour is taking over as Dow Jones CEO at a time when most major media companies are struggling from the coronavirus pandemic.
News Corp tapped Almar Latour to become chief executive officer of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal, turning to a veteran news and business executive to steer the company through a difficult time in the media industry.
Mr. Latour, 49 years old, currently publisher of Barron’s Group, will succeed William Lewis as Dow Jones CEO on May 15, News Corp said Monday. Mr. Lewis served for six years and helped oversee a major digital transformation at Dow Jones, a News Corp unit whose properties include the Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch.
Mr. Latour takes the helm as the media industry confronts big challenges from the coronavirus pandemic. Many publications are seeing a spike in digital readership but a sharp drop in advertising—which is often one of the first expenses cut by companies looking to preserve cash in times of crisis.
Beyond the crisis, media outlets face deeper questions about how to sustain growth in digital subscriptions and draw a bigger share of digital ad dollars, given the dominance of Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. News Corp reports quarterly results Thursday.
A 25-year Dow Jones veteran who commutes to News Corp headquarters in Midtown Manhattan by bicycle, Mr. Latour has a deep combination of journalistic and executive experience. He led the Journal’s coverage of the telecommunications industry during a period of massive change and consolidation in the early 2000s, and later transitioned to managing editor of WSJ.com at a time when the website was expanding its coverage beyond business and finance.
A native of the Netherlands, Mr. Latour got his start at the Journal as an intern at its Brussels office in the summer of 1995 and joined the newspaper as a news assistant in the Washington bureau that fall, he said in an interview Monday. He later served as a reporter in London, Stockholm, Brussels and New York, according to News Corp.
Mr. Latour moved quickly up the company ranks. After serving as managing editor of WSJ.com, he moved to Hong Kong in 2009 to become editor in chief for the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in Asia-Pacific. He later served as executive editor of the Journal before being named publisher of Barron’s Group.
One analyst suggested that Mr. Latour would need to turn immediately to cost-cutting measures as the pandemic upends advertising spending.
“His most important challenge is dealing with the ongoing migration to digital from print, particularly the falloff in print advertising and print circulation revenues,” said Craig Huber, an independent media analyst with Huber Research Partners.
Dow Jones has undergone a period of significant growth in recent years, with the Journal nearly tripling its number of digital subscribers to just over 2 million at the end of February and the company developing new lines of revenue through specialized professional business offerings.
News Corp on Monday said Dow Jones’s digital-only subscriber numbers increased by 17% year-over-year as of the end of 2019, and total consumer subscriptions hit 3.5 million in February.
Dow Jones has been one of News Corp’s brightest spots lately, as the corporation has struggled with losses in Australia and the U.K.
—Lukas I. Alpert contributed to this article.
Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com
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Almar Latour Named CEO of Wall Street Journal Publisher Dow Jones - The Wall Street Journal
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