If you want to provide news tips or documents to The Wall Street Journal, there are several ways to do so. It’s still possible for tipsters to reach out directly to our reporters by phone or email if they feel comfortable doing so. The tools outlined below can help you communicate more securely, and in some cases, anonymously, though no strategy is foolproof.
Keep in mind: the most useful news tips are detailed, provide some documentation and suggest names of people the Journal might contact to verify the information.
If you want a reply from someone at the Journal, please select a secure way to do so from the choices below. Messages will be checked on a regular basis but replies could be delayed. Please note that the Journal may not respond to all messages. Use these tools at your own risk and after reviewing the terms and instructions provided by the app developers.
Send us a letter or a parcel.
Address it to:
Michael Siconolfi, investigations editor
The Wall Street Journal
1211 Avenue of the Americas, 5th floor
New York, NY 10036
For greater anonymity, don’t put a return address on the outside of the envelope. Instead, consider putting your return address inside the envelope or providing a Signal phone number for us to contact you.
Signal is a free app that allows users to call and message one another in an encrypted environment. The app can be used to make phone calls and send text messages. Users can also exchange files, such as photos and PDFs.
Signal’s developer has posted extensive details about how it responds to requests from the U.S. government at https://whispersystems.org. Signal says it collects very little about its users. Information on who users contact and what they discuss are not stored by the app’s developers, and messages exchanged within the app can be set to automatically “disappear” (think self-destruct), erasing all evidence of the interaction.
How to use Signal
Signal is available for Android and iOS.
After installing the app, you can contact The Wall Street Journal at this number: 347-413-0496.
After you’ve installed Signal on your mobile device, you can install the desktop version, which allows you to chat from your computer.
You can send The Wall Street Journal information and/or documents through SecureDrop. Anything you provide via this system will be encrypted on a computer under our physical control and only decrypted on an offline computer disconnected to any network. The system is designed to help protect your anonymity, even from the Journal.
To use SecureDrop, you should follow these steps. For the best identity protection, we suggest you connect to the internet using a public Wi-Fi network.
Once you’ve done this, the system will give you further instructions and a username, which you should memorize. The Journal should be able to contact you within SecureDrop via this anonymous username.
SecureDrop is an open source project managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Additional details on using it are available at the SecureDrop site.