Tucker’s Last Stand

Emma Tucker
A veteran of Fleet Street, Tucker had been hired as a change agent, with a mandate to make the stodgy business broadsheet edgier, faster, and less erudite, and she had no qualms about culling. Photo: Shannon Finney/Getty Images for Semafor
Dylan Byers
March 14, 2025

Last spring, in a memorably feeble display of newsroom defiance, disgruntled staffers at The Wall Street Journal marched to the office of Emma Tucker, their then newish editor-in-chief, and stuck brightly colored Post-it notes to the glass wall protesting her restructuring of the U.S. news desk, which included the elimination of fewer than a dozen staffers. The gesture epitomized both the reticence that Journal staff felt toward Tucker, and their inability to do much about it. A veteran of Fleet Street, Tucker had been hired as a change agent, with a mandate to make the stodgy business broadsheet edgier, faster, and less erudite, and she had no qualms about culling. (Though, had she been able to get away with it, she probably would have culled more, faster.) Anyway, she wasn’t in her office that day, and by the time she returned, the Post-it notes were gone.