Hiten Patel: On today's episode of the Innovators Exchange, I'm delighted to welcome Almar Latour, the CEO of Dow Jones and the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Welcome, Almar.
Almar Latour: Hey! Great to be here, Hiten. It looks like our roles have reversed, you know. Usually, we ask the questions as journalists, and here we are.
Hiten: Oh, no, no! I'm very excited for this conversation. Why don't you start, Almar, with a brief intro into your current role at the company?
Latour: All right. So, as you just mentioned, I'm CEO for Dow Jones, a leading business news and information company, and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, which is a flagship brand that we have under the Dow Jones umbrella. It's a company that's growing very fast in transformation, like many companies that started out as media companies we're working toward a new model, a new approach, and have been successful in doing so, over the past number of years. What we do is deliver reliable information to people who make decisions, simply put. Distinction between good outcomes and bad outcomes more often than not is the information that you base those decisions on. And this is where we come in with our business journalism, which is world renowned from Barron's, from the Wall Street Journal, from MarketWatch, from Financial News in London, where you are right now, and from so many other publications that are all focused on business and finance.
But we do more than that. We also focus on specific areas of expertise, risk management and compliance, energy, and commodities, wealth management, and finance. And we've over the past few years reimagined the company as really, truly an Information Service company that has a phenomenal news arm, business news arm. We've reorganized it, not in accordance necessarily with brands, but with vertical expertise. We have a business news arm, of course. The Wall Street Journal plays a leading role in that right now. Really narrating, unlike anyone else right now, what's going on in the world. We have a wealth and investing arm, which has some brands that you know, Barron's, MarketWatch, but also a group we call WAM, wealth and asset management, that gathers and convenes wealth managers, private equity news, and such. Energy I just mentioned, where we have OPIS and CMA [Chemical Market Analytics]. Those are two outfits that focus respectively on oil and crude, but also new forms of energy, as well as on chemicals. And then, as I mentioned, risk, a Big R. If I may, I can unpack the operating model that we've created. But feel free to interrupt as needed. Each of these super verticals operates with four key areas in mind. We believe that we need to be dominant in news. In this particular vertical, in any particular vertical we need to have proprietary data. We either create that, or we acquire that. If you combine those two, you can do forecasting, and even consulting, and proper analytics, and play a more meaningful role in the workflow for our clients. And we have convening power, bringing together the leading minds and the leading thoughts in any given industry.
And so, we've set that up. And if you have those four elements, what we have observed over the years and tested is you get a network effect of sorts. You get people at the top who are conversing on your platform, conversing about the key topics that then maybe are generated also by the news that you've produced or creating news. Meanwhile the people who work with your data see their bosses, start their day with your news, and it becomes a very tight community that then lends itself to creating ever more services and understanding that community better, and serving that community better.
So, that is what we've set up, at least a theoretical framework around what we've set up. But all that leads us to this moment that we find ourselves in in the world, where I've done this at several rooms with people and speeches recently. I've asked a room full of finance managers, risk managers, executives, CEOs, who here has never seen more change in the past year than they have in their entire lifetime. And without fail the entire room raises their hand. And this feeling of change, of course, has been percolating for a long, long time. It's accelerating. It's gaining steam, it's not abating whatsoever. And we exist at Dow Jones for this moment.
Hiten: When I hear you talk, there's definitely a feeling of this meeting of the moment. Like, it's incredibly a tremendous portfolio you guys have evolved, and shaped, and brought together, and a flagship brand at the heart of it. But as you describe the model that you have shaped this towards, there's definitely for me a sense of meeting the moments. Before I unpack a lot of what you said, and there's so much for us to jump into. I always like to get listeners to kind of learn a little bit more about you, like you weren't born the leader of one of the most influential media organizations in the world, right? You started out somewhere before that. So, I'd always like to kind of just rewind the tape, just so people kind of understand who is speaking. So, it'd be great just to start as arriving in the US as a student and then working on The Penn, and like, just talk to me a little bit about those early chapters before we get to the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ and unpacking that.
Latour: Yeah, great. So, first off, I was born in a small village in Holland, not speaking English. This was at a time that the world wasn't very global, and the borders were very firm, and people were looking more inside than outside. But I always had a hunger to understand the outside world. I had a family that had a long history of traveling and being outside and building their fortunes elsewhere. But we grew up at the tail end of the Cold War and wanted to understand, sort of, how does the force that was shaping my world, how that operated. I lived in an odd little patch of Holland, where they had satellite television. The only little part, and they only had it because there was a US base nearby that was also very, very closed off. And so, I got exposure to even more Americana than you would normally get, and at the same time, even beyond that, there were so many elements in culture and society that basically were a derivative of the US. And so, I wanted to understand that. I really had a yearning to just really understand that. So, I decided to go on a gap year and to basically learn English and learn to understand the US. Landed in Western Pennsylvania. We'll come back to that in a moment. I'm still on my gap year now.
Hiten: The world's best gap year.
Latour: Yeah, it's not over. Be careful of the decisions that you make early on. But I felt at the time, at the end of my year in the US, I had my road paved for me in Holland. As things are in Europe from a young age, you said, know what you're going to do. Go to University of Amsterdam, etc. And I realized that the world was open to me in the US. I could shape my own world. And during that year my English had gotten good enough. I had a professor who said, hey, if you can get a paycheck for what you write, and you're a professional journalist, and just on the cusp of closing that first year I got my first paycheck. I never cashed it, and I pinned it on the wall, and I said, I'm a professional writer.
Hiten: Can you remember what the article was?
Latour: It was on a protest in Harrisburg. See, there's always been protests in the US. And Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, and I forget what the protest was about. I've got to go back and see. But I was so proud to have written it. And that area where I landed then and sort of cut my parachute from Holland. It was in Western Pennsylvania, a mining area where at the time there was a lot of malcontent, and I got to understand the US from the inside out. Understanding that it wasn't actually everything that I saw on TV, namely, Hollywood, and in New York and Washington.
Hiten: Wrestlers, Bart Simpson, and kids’ TV shows.
Latour: Yeah, although that has become our reality now. But those people were very powerless at the time. But there was an anger that was brewing, that was palpable at the time. And as I moved through my career, I sometimes would be working side by side with colleagues who had grown up on the East Coast or grown up on the West Coast. And realizing that even though I was very foreign, an alien, I had a different appreciation for the two Americas that were evolving at the time. And I think what I observed at the time, and later came back in a big way, that did not surprise me, was that there was residual anger. There was a malcontent. That people in New York and Washington and LA have more in common with kids in London and Amsterdam than they do with 100 miles, or even 50 miles outside those cities. And so, I was not surprised by it. And I also, I think, learned to understand how people operate there. And so, a lot of what we see today I think I have an appreciation for in a different way than people who might not have had that exposure.
So, I did three things in my career. I think if you want to follow through on that. I was a reporter and a foreign correspondent that lived in about seven different locations and countries. In Northern Europe, I covered Central and Eastern Europe. Lived three times in Brussels, lived in London, lived in Hong Kong, and this was by design to just understand the world and see what operates it.
The second theme throughout my career is technology. We were the first ones to get a home computer, the first ones to play with the Internet. Even when I lived in a little village in Holland, I programmed, did HTML [Hypertext Mark-up Language] programming in school, and later became a technology editor, became the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Online, as it was called at that time, and really got a chance to bring the Wall Street Journal to the digital age, as it was evolving at that time.
And then the third part that is a leitmotif is, I'm a builder. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I like to shape the world around me, and I've been very blessed to have a chance to do that in a business environment, in a media company, having created first Dow Jones media group, the Barron's group, and now shaping Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. So, it was more than that you asked. But there you go.
Hiten: No, there's a lot in there, and I'm going to just drop in on some of those three chapters, because I think there's a lot to draw on. So that first section, when you globally, you know, it's that global reach that you experienced, talk to me about how that's helping you now. Like, if I think about my role, which is much more minor but I'm finding it really difficult to uphold a global view when things get so divergent? Five, six, seven, eight years ago it was kind of easy. But how much are you drawing from the fact you have lived experience in such a diverse range when you're now leading such a prominent international organization?
Latour: Yeah, I would say in two ways. So one, there is a direct appreciation of how different cultures and leading cultures that are impacting the world right now, how they operate, and I have, I think, an appreciation from the inside out. So I spent significant time in going to mainland China and help narrate that evolution at a time when that was a very exciting story and not an adversarial story. And so, I believe I have a solid understanding of at least that starting point theme for Europe. I think I understand Europe quite well. And so, there's a cultural appreciation, an intellectual appreciation, an economic appreciation. And so, I think that's one thing. And that's basically the cumulative effect of either having traveled a lot or lived in a lot of places. I think the second part is more pertinent to my job and that is, having lived in so many places and having operated in so many places has taught me how to navigate uneven terrain. And when you are dropped into an environment where you do not speak the language, where you do not have a network, where you do not share a common standard, where you're not injected into the elite or into another stratum of society, you are forced to explore. You are forced to make compromises. You are forced to be humble; you have to embrace humility. How hard is it, Hiten, to not speak the language very well, and still continue on with the conversation?
Well, if you live in a place, you really have no choice, and so I've been taught that again, and again and again, and so became addicted really to operating in an uneven terrain. And I think technology is very much like that, too. You are operating right now in AI [Artificial Intelligence], in uneven terrain. One week is this and the next week is that. And so, all of that has given me a sense of comfort when there is disorder, when there are shockwaves, and that's when I'm the calmest. And so, I thrive on moments like that. I don't luxuriate, I'm not happy that it's that way. But I am the best version of myself in that. One little side note, I later found out that in media a lot of foreign correspondents were the first ones to go into digital. And I think it has something to do with already understanding that there's a wide world out there that you don't fully understand. But it can be really, really exciting.
Hiten: Yeah, well, that's neat segue there. I'm just going to put a marker on that powerful image around the uneven terrain and being comfortable in that. I do think that is a really powerful concept you're embracing. Segueing onto the technology side. I guess you said you led the WSJ [Wall Street Journal] online presence in the build. I guess at a time, describe to me how much of a leap into the unknown that was? Particularly as we're going to come onto the AI story right now, where it's very difficult to understand where we're going. But you've already had one of those transitions, right, like, it's really easy looking back, being like the obvious, everything needed to go online. But at the time when you were at the forefront of that, how much visibility did you have? What instincts were you relying on when you were taking a very established print media business, you know, leader in the field and taking it somewhere that was different? And probably a bunch of people wondering why and asking you some questions. Talk to us about that.
Latour: Well, it was a remarkable time. I remember agreeing to take this job to run WSJ online and getting a phone call from one of the colleagues that I respected the most. I won't mention her name. She actually gave me condolences and said, “Why are you throwing away your career in journalism? You're the tech bureau chief. You're really going places. And so why would you go to this backwater? Have you seen this site, I mean, who would want to work there?” And that was by no means unique. That was the ubiquitous reaction.
But yeah, having had comments like that when I moved to Asia, or when I moved to Stockholm, or to Eastern Europe, I was already fortified that this is what's going to happen. But I had a deep sense of conviction because I'd covered the tech space by then, and the mobile space for a long time. Had seen a tire company, Nokia become Europe's largest company. And so, I had a very firm conviction that we needed to change our ways in order to thrive in this new environment. So one, I think it was great conviction. I thought that by arriving on the digital side of the house there would be an embrace of change, but that turned out to be a very conservative place digitally as well. Because that first wave of digital, yeah, it was sort of you know, the yellow pages on a monitor, or the print newspaper on a monitor.
And so, one of the first changes I made, I said, yeah, we're the Wall Street Journal. Shouldn't we have a photo on the site? And so, people are like, you know, buzzing about "he wants to put a photo on a monitor". So, I decided to put a photo at the top of the page. And I'm very pleased with myself. So, this is a tiny little change, but we've made it. I step out for a cup of coffee, and I come back, and it has been taken down because there was so much of an ingrained feeling that we do things just so. And so, I knew I was up against a lot of old habits that had to be changed. And so, a lot of what I saw back then applies to today.
What you need, though, is persistence. You do need to take risks. We spent at that time a year and a half building a new version of the Wall Street Journal that today the echoes of that are still there. So, we created something that really lasted. And along the way, there were many moments to drop out of that journey, but we stuck with it. You also need a little bit of luck, and sometimes timing helps. The day that we launched this new version of the Wall Street Journal turned out to be the day that Lehman fell [Lehman Brothers bank, bankrupted Sept 15, 2008].
And so, our problem didn't become like, oh, you know, is anyone going to come to our site? Our problem became, will our site handle the traffic, and that moment then generated so much interest. It coincided with this launch. It really marked a step change in how we related to digital, and then it became clear to the entire organization, wait, this is how people take in information and change was not done by any stretch, but we leapfrogged. And so, a big lesson is that you have to work at something for a long, long time, you may not see results. You may be scolded or ridiculed for it. Your success might not be in sight, and you might not even know when it might hit. But when it does finally arrive, right, it's the result of all the preparation that you put into it, and I think when you're navigating uneven terrain, you're being disciplined about building what you set out to build. With, of course, inputs from and responding to change, etc. Having grit and having commitments to a vision. Hedging your bets gives you exactly that. You get, you know, a little bit of both. You've got to make bets. You got to have a vision. It's better, I think, to execute against the vision and find out that you need to revise it than making a small bet or no bet, or many, many little bets.
Hiten: Hearing you talk, for me the patterns are clear, right? You talked earlier about thriving in that uneven surface, that explorer mindset. You talk about the journeys. You take almost a heavy legacy of a print media business and go on that journey. You got to draw upon all of those skills. And I'm going to bring us to the ‘here’ and ‘now’, because we feel like we're having another kind of meet the moment where you've got a high intensity focus in the news environment you've got. You've got AI and all that it could bring, and all that it could risk. Talk to me about ‘here’ and ‘now’, you're leading the organization. You talked at the top of the conversation about how you've evolved data information services. For me there's an evolution. It seems, right, from that traditional media company to data and info services. There's a blurring of the boundaries when everyone thought data had to be in an API [Application Programming Interface], and it had to be a number. And suddenly, AI. Now everyone's recognizing the value of text, etc. So, talk to me how you're exploring this phase, and as a leader of the organization.
Latour: And speaking of the blurring of the lines. Right? You're a leading, a major consultancy and you're doing a podcast, right. And so, the blurring of the lines is immense, and we have to observe it. If the first order of business is to make sure that everybody understands that we have to change, and we have to move, and that is an always on task. And so, being transparent to the employee base, and to make sure that they understand that we live in a changing environment. In media and in businesses that are comfortable there was a, I would say, a surprising lack of knowledge of how the business operated, and that makes it very easy to be resistant to change or to ignore change, because, you know, somebody else has taken care of the business, and so there's a dependency there that is unhealthy. You want people to be proactively involved. I say this as a preface to all the big things that we're facing, because unless you change that attitude, you're going to lose.
You're not going to get through. I call this and have done this at various stages of my life. I've seen this from up close, and the anecdote about the photo is one element of that. I call it number one disease. Particularly if you have a strong legacy. You feel you're entitled to the spot that you have in the world, and the brand carries you beyond maybe the capability of the operation, or even the ability of the individual. You can find yourself on a hang glider, right, and so the wind will take you to places maybe you have some ability to steer, but it's by no means a rocket.
And so that has to be addressed again and again. I see it as also, we've talked to many, many CEOs. I see it in so many places, and so you do not address that at your peril. Like, if you do not address number one disease. Arrogance is, I think, what kills great brands, and so coming in with humility. And I think going back to navigating uneven terrain, you just got to acknowledge that when it comes to AI and generative AI, yes, we have a lot of history and automation. Yes, we have great PhDs working for us who are at the developing stages of what today is generative AI. But we are like many other companies, a baby when it comes to this environment that is changing by the day around us. So that's about the organization, and how do you connect with the organization, and what is the attitude that you bring to this? And you have to keep reminding yourself of that, because it's very easy to say. People who are not used to change will say, this: “Are we done now? Now we've done this. We've rolled out Gemini [Gemini Group Global Corp]. Are we done? Yeah, right? Okay, so I know how to prompt a chat. Are we done?” And so no, we're not done. And pushing that attitude is incredibly important. So then how does it work for the rest of the business, specifically around generative AI. So, breaking it down for us, there's something foundational. We have to recognize the value of our intellectual property. The media industry has gone terribly wrong on that during the search days where the Internet had to be free. And all the major media companies thought, oh, I get a handful of dollars from Google and from Yahoo, etc. And I'm better off. And then you wake up one day, and 2% of the app market is still yours, and the rest is controlled by the platforms. So right now, with AI, we're facing a similar moment where we have to establish that if our information is used, then the value needs to be reflected, and there needs to be a revenue stream around it.
That's foundational. We're fighting that fight. We're striking big deals, one with OpenAI. When companies in our view violate this and do not respond appropriately, we will take you to court, and we'd much rather end up in a commercial agreement, but we have to fight at this very moment. That I would put in a separate box, because then I think that's disconnected from where the real show is, and the real show is, how do you deploy it? How do you adjust your organization to what's happening? You have, for Dow Jones, and for all of our publications and all our capability three buckets. One is efficiency that everybody deals with, better ways of working and that can be profound. And we've only seen the beginning of that.
We have a couple of 100 translators for nine languages right now. Translation, you know, into languages in which we didn't operate has become so much easier, so much cheaper, that it has actually allowed us to, you know, operate under the rubric of efficiency but it's really expansion, we will be launching a foreign language Wall Street Journal version that is guided by humans but created by AI in terms of language. And so now do that times every country in the world. Now you've changed the premise of what we are. The Wall Street Journal alone is probably 80% US 20% outside. But you go to the ends of the world and people will know the brand. It's an incredibly well-known brand, right? Just like Dow Jones. Barron's is also up there. But the Wall Street Journal everyone knows. But it's not necessarily available, and it's not necessarily part of people's experience. The threshold for that has come way, way down. And so, I put that in an efficiency bucket, because initially, we just thought, oh, we can save potentially some cost by making translation easier. But it has inverted what it means to be a translator. You now can offer, maybe local context for what something means. But the actual translation of something happens instantaneously. So, the profound consequences for something so pedestrian, but they spend a lifetime, you know, building the Wall Street Journal in Chinese, the Chinese Wall Street Journal. At the time a Korean version or blog. The Japanese edition of the Wall Street Journal. We did one in Bahasa. Painstaking, super hard to do.
And then even if there is success, then it's hard to translate it into dollars, because the costs are so high. And then when there's a hiccup in the home market and the budget goes away. And so this is a, we've only just scratched the surface of efficiency. How our reporters can analyze data sets and can create new stories. How our researchers in different arms of the company can do comprehensive research, guided by humans, but enabled by machines with processing data sets that were inconceivable before. That will lead to the key things that drive our mission, right, reliable information to help people make decisions. We can create probably vastly greater amounts of reliable information and more distinctive and unique and proprietary information by unleashing what the human creativity and the interactions that you and I are having right now with what the machine can bring. And those two things together we call authentic intelligence at Dow Jones. The combination of human steerage and human creativity, aided by the profound impact of computational power and generative AI in this case, and that is becoming a driving force. Efficiency is one. New products - the approach is really working with clients as much as possible to say, what is it that you need? So that we're not building in a vacuum.
But the aim is to make it easier and lower the threshold for people to extract information from us. And then there are numerous products that have come out. One that is in the risk category, for example, that is called integrity check. Which has made it possible for, effectively to apply self-help when it comes to compliance for some of the corporates that are doing risk assessments, analyzing large sets of names. And so, they can do the first tier through us. They can do that themselves at a much lower cost, and then decide, okay, where do I go deep? And that's where we can meet you. The final place, for now anyway, is that we can also play the role of a marketplace. A marketplace for content creators, and publishing houses, and others through our Factiva platform, where we currently provide royalties to people who access our database of 1.5 billion pieces of data. A tremendous database, all with reliable information, 15,000 publishers that feed into that. And we have all of their archives. And so, the old digital world, and the non-generative AI world getting royalties for content that's used is incredibly important. And so, there's a business model that exists around that.
But now banks and other companies want pipelines of reliable information to go into their own generative AI machines and that royalty piece in this case, in the generative AI arena has to be taken care of, and we can play a role in doing that, a unique role. And so right now, I think we are worldwide leading in having the largest number of publishers having signed up for this particular marketplace. We have 5,000 thereabouts publishers who have agreed to let us be the marketplace for royalties coming back and payments coming back if their content is being used for generative AI, where we have deals right now. And so, there's two sides of the market, the publishers that supply the content, and then the end users, and that are large corporates. And so mainly we have right now large corporates and financial institutions that are on the other side of that equation that are using that content for their AI, their own AI capabilities, and then platforms would be next. So, can we be the interface with a platform as well? So, there's so much going on. And you know, Hiten, this as well as anyone. Yeah, this is sitting on top of already all the exciting things that are going on underneath that and what you know you could, in a crass way, call BAU [Business As Usual]. I mean that business is also no longer as usual, there's so much happening. So, it's the most exciting time that I've ever seen in my field in the world. There is, of course, a lot of anxiety, but I think it's also exhilarating.
Hiten: So much in there, Almar, so much in there. I think you are going to need to draw on that explorer mindset on steroids, as you work all of that out. But there's clearly a fundamental shift as you lay out, and there's probably more to come. I'm going to draw you back a few times in the conversation. The words have come up ‘reliable’ and ‘trusted’. I suspect, in the long history of the brands and the publications you run that's been a constant. But now, more than ever, just the volumes of information that people are trying to navigate. You know, it suddenly feels like we're at the shift now, where it's not about the quantity, this reliability, this trust that you mentioned is becoming more critical. How are you guys embracing, navigating, thinking about that dimension?
Latour: Yeah. So, we are supported by data points internally on all of this. So, the more noise there is out there, the higher the relative value of reliable information. The more players there are out there, the higher the value of your legacy if your legacy is one of trust. Because people have to make choices. And so, they already associate you with that. Here's where we see the data support the importance of trust, to us specifically. If you look at the VIX [Volatility Index] and you see a bump, a spike, or a trough, you can overlay B2B [Business to Business] and B2C [Business to Customer] subscription data and you see a direct correlation to the number of people, a) that come to seek out our information; b) and to the number of subscribers and clients that need our services and decide at that moment they need our services right now. Right? So that is a marvel to look at, because it really connects. So, an example in the past would be, you see the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you see demand for energy services go up, you see demand for the Wall Street Journal go up at that moment. You can see it. So basically, every day of the week you'll see something like that, because there's always a specific subset of society, or the global business world, or the global economy that is grappling with a specific issue. So, there are extreme examples. But then, at a micro level, you see this happening almost every day.
A recent example is, you know, very unexpected, the then Prime Minister of Canada, Trudeau, gave a rather impassionate speech, in which he sort of directs the American President, and says ( and I'm paraphrasing here, but "I'm not used to citing the Wall Street Journal”. And then he goes on to cite the Wall Street Journal, and he cites in this case an opinion piece that said, okay, the dumbest trade war in history. Obviously, he wants to cite that to support his case. I stand on the sidelines of that. But that is what the opinion pages had written, and so Trudeau cites that. And we see a spike in Canada and those few days where people want to understand what is going on in Washington, and they come to us. And so, we're in this unique position where everything that's happening right now in the world that is connected to business or the global economy and geopolitics, everything is a trigger for interacting more with us.
What we have seen traditionally for numerous years now is that trust is the biggest converter for the Wall Street Journal. So, if you want to subscribe, what is the factor that plays into that? The most self-declared? This is what people say that drives them. It brings to the fore an important part of our strategy, which to me was very reminiscent of being told condolences when I went into digital or good luck, you're going to write about reindeer when you go to Stockholm. But you actually end up writing about the global mobile revolution. And that is five years ago, and Hiten, I think you were there at the start. I saw that the world of B2C and B2B come together, and I call that at the time B2P [Business to Professionals], because the consumers who use the Wall Street Journal are in the global business world, and they're navigating their daily lives and their work lives. And the Wall Street Journal is a work tool. And then on the B2B side, those are the same people, but they're just sitting at their office.
And so, this is why we sketched out a strategy where we're growing by adding depth, growing deeper and more proprietary information, more distinctive journalism, growing by adding more industries where we apply that vertical that I told you about news, data, analytics, and convening power, adding more industries. We just added of all things; we acquired Oxford Analytica. So, we added geopolitics as a vertical for us in a very explicit way. And then, the third way of growing is by connecting everything that we have, meaning that we, as Dow Jones, can create a mosaic of data from which you can pick the pieces that you want, and you create your information mosaic that is going to inform you and help you make decisions. So, that you can draw on the frontline notes from Yaroslav Trofimov, who is reporting from Ukraine or from the Middle East, and you can connect that to what we learned through Dragonfly and Analytica and bring all these things together. So, you can create the information flow that you need. And so, it's a remarkable moment for us where not only are each of our individual brands and each of our individual verticals incredibly well positioned to respond to the thirst, and the need, and the necessity for trusted information. But collectively, we can create new information and new mosaics of data and analytics that are even more meaningful for you.
And so, as we are all navigating uneven terrain, what better tool can you have than an ever-changing, ever-bespoke information mosaic that will help pave a path for you? And so that was the vision five years ago. People didn't understand it. I think the fact that you and I are here talking on a podcast demonstrates that these walls between the consulting world and the media world have completely crashed.
And so now, what was, and still frankly, on the capital markets. Equity markets are still seen as sort of a negative, having a media company as part of a B2B offering. Well, I say, we have a leg up because we have a global intelligence network that the world has never seen. That is powered now by some of the finest humans who do research and reporting mixed with an exceptional data pool. Mixed now and accelerated by generative AI, which actually makes that vision, the realization of that vision we have much faster, and accelerates all of this. And so, all these pieces are coming together, which is why you actually at this moment see me smiling.
Hiten: There's so much in there. Feels like there's another parallel, whether it's the wider audiences or the stock market and the valuations. It’s easy for them to see your ex-post, right? The same note as your condolences on the launching of the digital online version. I think the world will eventually recognize that. I'm just going to switch tack and a couple of quick questions before we run out of time. I wanted to talk about the broader role of leadership that you've had to embrace. Like every CEO has to face their challenges. You have personally had to face quite a unique set of challenges. I'm talking specifically about things like navigating the Evan episode. Talk to me about how you source the inspiration, the will, the desire to lead when there's some quite non-standard things come at you?
Latour: Yeah, what you're describing, and just so the people listening will understand is one of our reporters. Evan Gershkovich was imprisoned wrongfully by Vladimir Putin and Russia, and that happened in an incredibly visible way. And what ensued was, I think, 491 days of fighting for his freedom. It was a remarkable experience, and I would say it was the unique moment where you, as a leader are challenged beyond anything that you could reasonably prepare for. And yet you have to draw on everything that you built before. It was, namely, a challenge that in this case exceeds the bottom line. It exceeds the responsibility for the income of families and our employees and the well-being of our employees. And you now have a life and death situation where you are fighting for something that is bigger than you, that is bigger than the company. And that goes beyond comprehension. Early on in this, and there's a cast of thousands who contributed to eventually getting Evan freed in the White House, and the State Department, and various intelligence agencies, the entire media world.
For me as a leader, the first thing I went back to was that when I was a news assistant in Washington, my first job, I was delivering mail. And some people are nice to you when you deliver mail. I don't know, Hiten, have you ever delivered mail?
Hiten: Grew up in a post office. So, I have a very intimate relationship with it.
Latour: There you go. So, the two kinds of people, people who acknowledge that the mail is being delivered. And then people who look past and are grumpy. And so, one of the people who was really kind to me in those early days was Daniel Pearl. He was a reporter who sat just a few desks away from me, as I was training to be a reporter while also delivering mail. And when I was stationed in London many years later, after 9/11, he did some reporting on Al Qaeda, and a few of you know where this story is going. He was kidnapped, taken by Al Qaeda, and was killed in a very, very public and gruesome way. And yeah, there's so much that I have to say about that emotionally. But for the sake of your question. I was propelled back to those days when I got the call in South Africa, happened to be visiting there, visiting of all places Nelson Mandela's prison. And when the FSB [The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation], the new KGB [Committee for State Security] announced to the world that they had arrested Evan on spy charges, and the first thing that went through my mind is, we have to do everything possible to make sure that Evan gets out alive. I think the stakes were so incredibly high, and I had seen before how these things in retrospect might seem like they have a happy ending, but they don't always.
And so, there was a conviction from the start that no resources could be spared. We set aside. We disconnected it from the from the corporate budget, made sure that we, as I thought of it in CEO terms, like we set up almost a separate company with a sole KPI [Key Performance Indicator], and that is to get and to get Evan out. And we did that by focusing attention on his case, by going to the White House, and the Hill, and to foreign leaders to plea for his case. And in the end, after many ups and downs, including horrific surprises, that were reminders that these things don't always end well. The death of the middle of all of this, the death of Navalny, right, where in the end, Evan came out. I got to be in the beginning very close to his family, which was an added driver too. There's no force like the force of a mother. And to spend time with them was a privilege and see how they weathered this was an inspiration and sort of helped me push through in the end. And I was delighted to be on the tarmac when Evan was released.
And as it so happened, I was the first one after the President and Kamala Harris had met him and his parents, had made their greetings to shake his hand. And we had a beautiful connection. We had never met each other, and that's where we met each other for the first time. And when I mentioned my name, he said: “Almar, my mother wrote about you”. And you know that's really where this circle was completed, and I knew that he was truly back, and we had done our job. But you also draw on navigating that uneven terrain. I mean, this is probably the most uneven terrain that I've ever seen. An outrageous robbery of somebody's freedom. A theft of somebody's life for a number of years. The first call that I made to the outside world was to the head of the WNBA [Women’s National Basketball Association] when this happened. And that's because Brittney Griner had just gone through this ordeal, and Cathy Engelbert, who was so kind and so generous in talking me through what they had gone through. And so, at an emotional level, and at a purpose level, and as a level of selflessness and humility this was stratospherically outside anything that I've ever seen, and I think it has changed me and a lot of other people hopefully for the better for the rest of our lives. At a technical level, I go back to navigating that uneven terrain. And so, what is it? What do you do? You're driven by your curiosity. You're driven by the connections that you have. You're constantly triangulating, you’re only satisfied when the primary KPI is met, and until such time you're just recalibrating, and recalibrating, and recalibrating, and trying again, trying again, and trying again. In retrospect, it's too crass. And because it was too big a thing to compare it in this way.
But there are parallels between how you move through transformation, how you move through change, how you put your arms around something that you don't know, and what we went through with Evan. And so, I think personally, I drew a lot on that, and luckily at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. We have a lot of people who actually lived lives like that, where they are driven by curiosity, where they are pushing their own boundaries all the time in order to get to a certain outcome, more often than not to get a factual grip on a situation. It was a remarkable and very heavy period, least of all for me, really. Really for the family and for Evan himself, and everyone who was close to him. But I would say, you know you asked about leadership, and I think this is sort of the final stage of leadership, or an extracurricular phase of leadership that maybe you don't always get a chance to embrace. But that is an extreme form of crisis where you have to abandon your self-interest or the normal parameters. And so, you're tested in ways that yeah, you never expected.
Hiten: Thank you for sharing such a moving account. There's a lot for everyone to draw from there. So, thank you for going through that, Almar. I am conscious you've been very generous with your time. We are overtime. I am going to let you get back to your very busy and demanding day job. All I'm left to say is, thank you so much for taking the time, being so open and reflective. I think there's a lot there for the rest of us, the whole audience, to be inspired by. So, thank you for making the time for this.
Latour: Great to spend time with you again, Hiten, and I'll see you soon.
Hiten: Thanks, Almar.
This transcript has been edited for clarity purposes.
