Trusted Sources

Josh Stinchcomb '91 believes trust and innovation are helping journalism meet the moment.

A longtime veteran of Condé Nast— where, among other things, he got a front-row seat to the digital revolution on the publishing side of Wired—Josh made the leap to Dow Jones seven years ago. The role puts him face-to-face with CMOs and CEOs all over the globe “to better understand what they’re after, what their problems are, and how we might be able to help.” This not only affords him a unique perspective on the geopolitics of, say, Japan or the Middle East—an education that never ends— but is often one of the most fun parts of his job: the creative challenge of strategizing the best way to position a brand’s message and zeroing in on whom, exactly, a client should target next. The fact-finding involved is “almost like playing the journalist,” he says. And the end result can be thrilling. “You come up with an idea in your head and then translate that into someone giving you a substantial investment. Where else does that happen?”

Of course, in today’s news business—and particularly in the unique, multifaceted business model of Dow Jones—selling ads is only one piece of a portfolio as diversified as the modern reader’s TikTok-ified media diet. Josh’s teams sell event sponsorships, “branded content” (custom advertising designed by Dow Jones’ nearly 100-person team of in-house creatives), and membership to a growing cadre of “executive councils” at which C-suiters network at Journal- themed summits and dinners around the world.

Meanwhile, on the Dow Jones side, they trade in both risk and compliance as well as energy data— everything from lists of corporate board members on the Russian sanctions list to the price of every gallon of gas sold in the United States. This information is aggregated, analyzed, and packaged for financial institutions, multinational corporations, and energy companies looking to cut smarter, more secure deals. 

The biggest wins, Josh says, come from crafting “uber deals” that bundle, for example, customized advertising with energy data and corporate access to Factiva, Dow Jones’ global news and business information database.

With all of these divisions servicing literally thousands of customers, Josh’s energies are focused on the bigger picture: strategizing to stay ahead of a rapidly shifting advertising industry and, often, serving as a public face of Dow Jones, advocating for its capabilities—and those of news in general—as a place for corporations to invest and partner.

Relative to other categories like entertainment and sports, “news is underinvested in,” he says. This doesn’t just impact media companies, he argues. It’s a detriment to potential advertisers, preventing them from effectively reaching their audiences. And with more than 3,200 American print newspapers shuttering since 2005—vanishing at a rate of more than two per week, according to a 2024 report from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism—ultimately, it hurts us all, he says.

What Dow Jones is really selling is trust—a commodity in increasingly short supply. In a Pew survey from last fall, only 56 percent of respondents said they had “a lot of” or “some” trust in the information they get from national news organizations—down 11 percentage points from a survey done six months prior, and 20 points lower than the same survey in 2016. That trust, Josh says, has “been diminished by the proliferation of bad actors and bad content and misinformation—things that are almost designed to obfuscate and confuse.”

Unfortunately, it’s about to get even harder to spot a fake. “We’re about to have a wave of that [misinformation] on steroids,” he says, thanks to a tsunami of AI-generated content, some of it amplified by “bad actors, from the sovereign level all the way down to the hacker level.”

Ironically, Josh sees at least part of the solution in artificial intelligence itself. The first step of safeguarding trust “is being sure that everything we do—any piece of news that we create, data that we sell, or analysis that we do—is so incredibly well- vetted and researched that we can stand behind it 100 percent.” Even for an organization as robust as the Journal, that’s time-consuming and expensive. Some of the cost savings to cover it, he says, will come from using AI to “accelerate processes that can be accelerated, so more time can be spent on reporting and confirmation of sources.”

Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, who came aboard in 2023, has won praise for making the paper’s tone a little less stuffy and more palatable to a digital-age audience. Part of that has involved implementing AI. Already, as loyal Journal readers will know, many articles start with a series of TL;DR bullet points, which are AI generated. (Somewhat counterintuitively, Josh says the average “scroll depth,” or how far readers actually get into a story, has increased since adding these synopses.)

The editorial team is already using AI software to scan articles for hidden bias, catching any hint of opinion that might creep into the news, bypassing the filters of both reporters and editors. Josh says that knowing that news reporting is separate from opinion, which, at the Journal, is generated by a team that lives on a separate floor from the news and that is helmed by a different editor, is another reason that Journal readers have kept the faith.

Talking to him, it’s clear that these are just the beginning of the AI transformations to come. “You can imagine a world where, as generative AI gets better, every article the Journal writes, you may be able to listen to, watch, get those bullet points, or read the whole thing,” he says. The Journal will serve the news any way you want it.

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