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🔎 The Wall Street Journal's PIP problem
Scandal PR will set you free, WaPo sub numbers, and Mar-a-Lago music
Lachlan Cartwright & Ravi Somaiya
April 01, 2025
In partnership with
Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo interviews WSJ Editor-In-Chief Emma Tucker (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)
Welcome to the latest edition of Breaker. We are Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya. If this email has been forwarded to you can subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
In today's edition, the Wall Street Journal and its editor Emma Tucker get into a strange situation with the corporate horror that is the Performance Improvement Plan, while the paper's owner Rupert Murdoch watches on and (allegedly) makes more weird new rules.
Come with us, too, into new depths of Scandal PR, which continues to eat the world. We have spoken to the PR operative who is at the center of a huge criminal justice story this week, the commutation of OZY Media co-founder Carlos Watson's sentence, and is involved in efforts to free perhaps America's most notorious prisoner.
Plus subscriber growth at The Washington Post, New York's outdoor dining disaster, and we name the person who controls the music at Mar-a-Lago, to the intense displeasure of any members with sensitive ears.
The Journal’s PIPs squeak
(Exclusive.) Performance Improvement Plans — in which management comes to a member of staff who they do not enjoy having around and ask them to improve in certain ways or else — are increasingly popular in the media world.
They’re known as PIPs. Just ask the Wall Street Journal where PIPs have almost doubled since editor in chief Emma Tucker took over in 2023. It was, perhaps, the inspiration for a November Journal story ‘The Most Hated Way of Firing Someone Is More Popular Than Ever. It’s the Age of the PIP.’
The piece from workplace reporters, Lauren Weber and Chip Cutter, went into granular detail to ask ‘Why are PIPs so common now?,’ ‘Why are PIPs needed?’ and ‘What’s it like to be put on a PIP?’
They didn’t have to look far for answers. They interviewed former Journal senior special writer, Stephanie Armour, who is currently suing the paper for discrimination and the fraudulent use of PIPs. She alleges the Journal used confected performance issues to get rid of her. But Armour’s quotes did not…
