Five years ago, when The Wall Street Journal rumor mill was churning about editor in chief Gerry Baker’s highly anticipated exit, two names emerged as favorites to take his place at the storied broadsheet. One was Matt Murray, a respected long-serving Journal veteran who’d recently been promoted to the No. 2 job there. The other, as I reported at the time, was Emma Tucker, then deputy editor of The Times of London, a sister publication in the sprawling family tree of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

When Baker finally stepped aside in June 2018—to much delight in the newsroom, where he was not exactly the most beloved guy—it was Murray whom the company appointed as his successor. But now, those red-hot Tucker rumors of yesteryear have come back with a vengeance. On Monday evening, Semafor strongly suggested that a high-profile switcheroo was in the works, reporting that “News Corp executives in London have told associates they expect the editor of the Sunday Times, Emma Tucker, to take the top editorial job at The Wall Street Journal.” The report caught the Journal’s newsroom off guard, according to multiple insiders. Back in September, whispers were flying all over New York and London that Tucker was headed for a new role at the Journal. Reporters at multiple outlets chased the chatter—myself included—but it didn’t seem to check out at the time, and the gossip cooled off as quickly as it had spread. Fast-forward to Tuesday morning, when Journal staffers were left scrambling to suss out the truth of Semafor’s report the previous night. Murray seemed to be in a good spirits, some noted, wondering if his apparently upbeat mood was really indicative of a guy about to be shown the door. (Or maybe it’s a scenario where he’d get some other job within the company? Who knows.)

Word in the newsroom, albeit unofficial, I’m told, is that Murray will be replaced sometime in mid-December. During a quarterly all-hands meeting on Wednesday morning, Almar Latour, CEO of the Journal’s umbrella organization, Dow Jones, was asked about the Semafor story. He said he wouldn’t comment on “rumor and speculation,” which is the same line I got from spokespeople at Dow Jones and News UK, Murdoch’s British newspaper division. Meanwhile, it’s silence so far from Murray, who kept the Journal running during the pandemic and supported major investigations on the likes of TikTok, Facebook, and federal judges. (After this story was published, a News Corp spokesman emailed, “We don’t comment on speculation. Matt Murray is a distinguished journalist and principled editor, whose leadership has ensured that the WSJ is the most trusted media source in the country. He is steering the Journal at a time of genuine growth and success.”)

Murray is popular among the worker bees, and his ascension in 2018 was seen as a restoration of order following Baker’s controversial five-year reign, marred by roiling internal discontent over his handling of the paper’s Donald Trump coverage. As a Journal lifer, Murray also seemed to represent a realignment with the paper’s roots, after more than a decade of rule by Murdoch’s lieutenants from abroad. Tucker’s appointment would signal a return to the familiar playbook of British and Australian editors being called in to oversee Murdoch’s titles in New York. She’s had the same career trajectory as Baker and his more well-liked predecessor, Robert Thomson, now CEO of News Corp: from The Financial Times to The Times of London to the Journal. Since 2020, Tucker has been editor of The Sunday Times, which last month won the London Press Club’s award for Sunday newspaper of the year. “A fitting salute as the paper celebrates its 200th anniversary,” Tucker noted on Twitter.

Journal folks are no doubt on edge about what a potential shake-up would mean for the paper, and they’re trying to get a read on the woman who may or may not be their new boss. As far as I’ve heard, Tucker is “well thought of,” as one plugged-in British journalist put it, and “people like working for her. She is widely regarded as having made The Sunday Times better after some rather patchy years.” She’s also said to be “more liberal” than Baker or Thomson, for whatever that’s worth, as well as keenly attuned to digital, which she has said was one of her focuses as deputy editor of The Times. “The challenge for us, as it is for so many legacy publishers,” Tucker said in an interview for the Media Masters podcast in 2018, when she was still in that role, “is getting the balance right between print and digital. We can’t afford to neglect our print product, because so many people still read the Times in print. But equally, we cannot allow old print practices to hold us back digitally. So it’s a constant nudging forward on the digital front.”

In the same interview, Tucker emphasized the importance of having “a range of voices” reflected in her publication. “We’re neither coming at you from the left, nor are we coming at you from the right, we’re trying to offer you both sides of the argument,” she said, wisely demurring when the host went on to suggest that Trump is “a lunatic that will one day kill us all, in my view.”

“In your view,” Tucker replied. “I couldn’t possibly comment—we’re neutral on our news coverage. And actually, in many ways, because there’s so much chat out there, so many people, so much partisan comment, again, people say, ‘Oh, it must be awful being a journalist now.’ I actually think it’s a really good time to be a journalist—for a reputable publication. Because what you’re trying to do is help people to make sense of these extraordinary times we’re living through.… Our mission is clear: to explain, analyze, comment, and help people make sense of these great historic events that are taking place around us.”