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Mothertucker

Not only has Emma Tucker completely revitalized the staid Journal with her suffer-no-fools attitude and upscale tabloid instincts, but her strategic bet to repopulate the D.C. newsroom (moving out a generation of retiring mentors in favor of pot-stirrers) has the paper eating the Times’s lunch in the second Trump era.

Emma Tucker
Into that vacuum stepped Emma, a veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s Times in the U.K., who embraced the role of change agent and quickly set about trying to make the paper edgier, faster, and less erudite. Photo: Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com
Dylan Byers
July 30, 2025

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Last week, shortly after The Wall Street Journal broke the news that President Trump’s Justice Department had informed him in May that his name was in the Epstein files—a follow-up to its previous mega-scoop about the president’s (alleged) lewd birthday card illustration—journalists inside the paper started sending around a provocative meme. It featured two cartoon dragons, and essentially posited that the Journal was eating The New York Times’s lunch. “We’re on fire,” one journalist there conceded when I mentioned the meme. “The Times was always thought of as number one,” said another. “I’m not sure you can make that case anymore.”