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June 30, 2020, 3:30 p.m.
Reporting & Production

The Wall Street Journal aims for a younger audience with Noted, an Instagram-heavy news and culture magazine

What Noted is not is a separate, cheaper Wall Street Journal gateway product (we remember you, NYT Now).

The Wall Street Journal has been previewing Noted, a monthly digital “news and culture” magazine for 18- to 34-year-olds, for the past couple of months, and on Tuesday it officially launched. Noted, whose tagline is “For you. With you. By you,” is a push to attract younger audiences to the Journal, and it’ll be published across platforms, with a section front on WSJ.com but also with content on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A couple of early stories included “Notes on the Pandemic” and “Coronavirus Video Diaries.”

The project is overseen by Dory Carr-Harris, the Journal’s Young Audiences editor (a new position as of the end of April) and Louise Story, the paper’s news strategist and CTO. It has a team of six reporters, many of whom joined the Journal in the past year — Deborah Acosta, Tyler Blint-Welsh, Alvin Chang, Alex Janin, J.J. McCorvey, and Allison Pohle. All of them were introduced on Noted’s Instagram account this week. Here, for instance, is a post introducing Blint-Welsh:

What Noted is not is a separate, cheaper Wall Street Journal gateway product (RIP, NYT Now). Noted is behind the Journal’s dynamic paywall, which offers non-subscribed visitors access to a certain number of free stories based on their propensity to subscribe. It’s included with a Wall Street Journal subscription, of course; Story also pointed out that more than 200 colleges and universities offer site licenses to all of the Journal’s products, thus including Noted. Each monthly issue will have a “cover story that is free to anyone.” A number of Noted stories will also pull out highlights and different parts of other Journal stories, and those stories will also be free. But it’s not some kind of “WSJ Junior” gateway product. “We’re not trying to migrate people,” Story said. “We’re not trying, over time, to move people from one product to another product. It’s all in our same product.”

In addition to those core reporters, Noted will use some freelance contributors, as well as other Journal reporters. But one of its main sources for feedback and story ideas will be Noted Advisers a group of more than 7,000 young readers who will be invited to preview content, give feedback, and join Q&As with Noted staff. The main community group will be hosted on LinkedIn. Over the last week, many of the Advisers announced their participation in the program in coordinated posts on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Laura Hazard Owen is the editor of Nieman Lab. You can reach her via email (laura_owen@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@laurahazardowen).
POSTED     June 30, 2020, 3:30 p.m.
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