Dow Jones ups Ashok Sinha to chief communications officer

Dow Jones has promoted Ashok Sinha to chief communications officer, effective immediately. 

Sinha joined Dow Jones last September as SVP and head of corporate communications, reporting to CEO Almar Latour and replacing Jennifer Thurman. He will continue to report to Latour and oversee all PR, internal, external, executive, crisis and financial communications for the company. 

Asked what the difference is between his new and old roles, Sinha said, “This is a title change that acknowledges how critical the function is to the organization.”

In an internal memo sent to staffers on Thursday, Latour explained that since Sinha joined the company, he has had a “transformative impact” on the business, rebuilding and leading the communications team to “effectively craft and share our story globally across functions.”

The comms team is made up of 20 people, Sinha said. He explained that he rebuilt the team by “moving from what was more of a business partner model to a model with cross-functional expertise.” 

The business partner model had staffers dedicated to supporting individual business units with comms.

Now, with cross-functional experts, “there is a team of external media relations experts, a team of internal comms experts, teams in EMEA and in APAC. This way you can support the business by bringing in experts in each of these functional areas based upon what the needs are of that business unit,” said Sinha. 

In Latour’s memo, he shared highlights from Sinha’s past year at Dow Jones, including: Effectively telling the Dow Jones growth story under Latour, with coverage by Axios, Press Gazette, New York Magazine; and successfully navigating the communications around the company’s negotiations with IAPE, the news union, ending with its new contract ratification earlier this summer. 

Sinha explained that the “most significant moment” of his career was overseeing communications efforts and media exposure throughout the wrongful detention of The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich in Russia. The Wall Street Journal is a Dow Jones company.

Last month, Gershkovich returned home as part of a multilateral prisoner exchange.

“A person’s life, liberty and freedom was at stake,” said Sinha. “Not only was this about [Gershkovich] being wrongly detained for doing his job, but also it was part of the broader issue of freedom of the press, which is under attack in a way it has never been before. From a comms and PR perspective, there is no playbook for that.

Sinha formerly served as SVP and head of corporate comms and PR at audio entertainment company Audacy. There, he also managed internal comms and executive thought leadership. 

Before Audacy, Sinha spent nearly five years at WarnerMedia as VP of corporate comms. He also has agency experience from a stint at Publicis Media as SVP of corporate comms. Earlier in his career, Sinha held senior comms roles at NBCUniversal, Viacom and Product(RED).

Sinha was on PRWeek’s Pride in PR list in 2022.

Dow Jones’s PR agency partner in EMEA and APAC is Allison, specifically around B2B businesses Energy and Risk & Compliance and not overall. The agency used to also support Dow Jones PR in the U.S., but Sinha narrowed the remit shortly after he started.

Dow Jones’ other brands include Barron’s, MarketWatch and Financial News.

Last year, Dow Jones inked a deal with media platform Cision to help comms and marketing professionals better manage their reputations and monitor business-critical topics. In July, less than a year into the partnership, Dow Jones filed a lawsuit against Cision for breach of contract. Cision then filed a counterclaim to the lawsuit, claiming Dow Jones violated its exclusivity contract and interfered with business relations by filing a lawsuit publicly, resulting in more than $170 million in damages for Cision.

Dow Jones is owned by News Corp. For News Corp’s fiscal Q4 2024, which ended on June 30, revenue rose 6% to $2.58 billion. Revenue at Dow Jones grew 4% in the quarter to $566 million, driven by growth in circulation and subscription revenue.