Wall Street Journal names a new editor

The Wall Street Journal named a new top editor Monday, saying it would hand control of the newsroom to Emma Tucker, a longtime editor in Britain. She replaces Matthew Murray, who has led the paper for the past four years, occasionally clashing with the paper’s publisher.

The Journal said Murray will take on a new role, reporting to Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp, The Journal’s parent company. Tucker starts Feb. 1, with Murray assisting with the transition through the beginning of March.

“[Murray] is 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,” Thomson said in a statement.

Tucker, 56, has been the editor of The Sunday Times in London, another publication run by Rupert Murdoch, the media titan who owns The Journal.

Murray, 56, who has worked at The Journal for nearly 30 years, took over in June 2018 after rising unrest in the newsroom. His predecessor was Gerard Baker, a Briton who also ran The Sunday Times in London before joining The Journal. Baker had faced complaints in the newsroom, including accusations by some reporters of going easy on then-President Donald Trump.

Staff morale largely improved under Murray, whose tenure included the awardwinning 2021 Facebook Files series, based on a cache of internal documents, and other impactful work. But he has disagreed with The Journal’s publisher, Almar Latour, over the paper’s direction and how to grow its subscriber base.