When News Corporation took over Dow Jones two years ago, it was quick to move out key senior Dow Jones managers and move in its own team that had a vision for how to make the brand a profitable and thriving outlet for business news and information. At that time I said on ContentBlogger, "The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow." I also speculated at the time whether Dow Jones Enterprise Media head Clare Hart would stick around to become a player in this mix or move on, suggesting that at least for a time she was respected enough that it was worth her hanging in there.

Labels: B2b media, Business Information, clare hart, consumer, Dow Jones, enterprise, Factiva, News Corp, NewsCorp, Wall Street Journal

In a move that shocked many B2B media insiders - including Incisive Media CEO Tim Weller - global information provider Reed Elsevier has announced the resignation of their CEO Ian Smith, to be replaced by Erik Engstrom, CEO of their Elsevier division. While early speculation from FT's Alphaville blog depicted the management shift as "a proper executive-level knifing," more considered comments from industry analysts and insiders in The Independent seem to indicate that Smith was falling on his own sword in recognition of some major challenges not easily resolved by someone with limited media experience. Three key factors were arguing strongly for changes at Reed Elsevier sooner rather than later: the selloff of Reed Business Information assets had stalled, pre-tax profits were down 52 percent in half-year results and investors lacked confidence in both projected earnings and Smith's aggressive recapitalization efforts. With Smith's mentor Jan Hommen having departed from Reed Elsevier's board in January to head the ING bank, a graceful exit was probably in order.

Labels: business, Business Information, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, elsevier, engstrom, enterprise, legal, LexisNexis, management, reed elsevier, scientific, technical, thomson reuters

I've been suggesting to my friends at Dow Jones for more than five years that they needed to consider how to use their Factiva content more aggressively on the Web as a source for virtual aggregation of news and business information. Well, five years isn't that long in enterprise content product cycles, I suppose, so when I tweeted the announcement by Dow Jones of its new Wall Street Journal Profession Edition yesterday morning, I was pleased to see that the WSJ had finally started to package licensed content from Dow Jones Factiva's news and business information database into an editorially-managed online edition. The WSJ Pro package will be strictly a premium offering, offered at first only to Dow Jones' enterprise customers starting in November, with wider availability expected next year.

Labels: B2b media, Bloomberg, Business Information, Dow Jones, enterprise, Factiva, News, prosumer, thomson reuters, Wall Street Journal, WSJ Pro

The Special Libraries Association convened its annual conference in Washington, DC recently, an event which had reassuring energy and solid attendance. SLA President Janice LaChance observed that attendance was up at this year's event compared to last year's conference in Seattle, Washington, an indication that lean times may not get people to remote locations but convenient locations are worth at least a day or two of investment for this key enterprise content community. I put together a summary video for your enjoyment below and more comments below the video that expand on some of the items featured in the video.

Labels: access innovations, conference, content, Dow Jones, enterprise, Factiva, information professionals, perfect search, sla, thomson reuters, video, wolters kluwer

Talk about a bad hair day for WSJ tech journalists.

When The Wall Street Journal ran an article today on a Google plan to add "edge caching" servers at key internet service provider facilities, this fairly common practice to accelerate content delivery to audiences via the Web was mangled into a political imbrollio. To wit, their lede:

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

Google was quick to correct the WSJ's outlook, as noted on their public policy blog and in a subsequent AFP story. Their point:

Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday's Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.

Intellectual property guru and Net Neutrality proponent Lawrence Lessig noted that his take on Google and the political ramifications of this move were a bit off-key in the WSJ article as well:

The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about a drama about an alleged shift in Obama's policies about network neutrality. What's the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that "prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject."

Who are these "Internet scholars"? Me. ...I've not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.

With more moving pieces than a Swiss watch in Washington right now, the current political environment surrounding Net Neutrality and other Web access issues during a transition in Washington's power brokers is bound to be subject to as much jockeying and bullying as possible. Today the U.S. Federal Communications Commission canceled a vote on making radio frequencies available that would provide free Internet access as a public utility, bowing to pressures from both industry advocates and politicians. There's a big push for open Web access, but plenty of pressure from all points of view keeping things comfortably in neutral for now.

Net Neutrality and related issues such as public Web wireless frequencies seem to boil down to one basic concept: Don't make audiences pay for artificial scarcity. Carriers are still free to sell "bigger pipes" and better overall service levels, but artificial cartels based on reserving audience-facing Internet bandwidth for private use will only create more challenges for publishers in the long run. If you want to have proof that this is so, just take a look at the balkanized state of mobile service carriers that lassoed content providers for many years into deals for distribution on their private networks. What publishers now confront are scattered and overpriced deals for growing but underperforming mobile markets, even as the carriers now reach for ad revenue shares to sweeten their take.

Proprietary mobile breakthroughs such as the iPhone and the Amazon's Kindle are great for publishers in many ways, but they represent a relatively small share of the potential marketplace for mobile content and ultimately just continue the myth that artificial network scarcity can benefit the publishing industry as a whole. All these devices do is lock publishers in to proprietary networks that are bound to make it harder to reach their audiences cost-effectively.

The truth is that the fastest-evolving, most cost-effective technology changes are best for publishers, making it imperative to enable an environment in which mobile and Web technology providers are not resting on proprietary laurels that hinder the development of Web and mobile markets for publishers. Without these breakthroughs, the audience reach that content producers need to make mobile networks a highly profitable distribution medium is not likely to materialize. Let's keep the future of publishing out of the hands of companies that still can't tell us whether to dial "1", an area code or nothing extra to make a phone call to the next town.
Net Neutrality will ensure that there is a cost-effective, rapidly evolving electronic distribution infrastructure that serves publishers best.

Labels: Dow Jones, Google, lessig, mobile, net neutrality

I had the pleasure to speak recently on an analyst call with Dow Jones' Darr Aley, incoming VP of Marketing and BD for their new Business & Relationship Intelligence unit being formed from their acquisition of Generate, along with Simon Bradstock, VP of Corporate Products. After congratulations to all for a great acquisition we went through some of the ins and outs of how Dow Jones will be using Generate's assets to generate new market opportunities and to accelerate their existing deal flow. While many of the details that we went over parallel closely my earlier post on this acquisition, we explored also the ways in which Generate assets will help Dow Jones to penetrate both global markets and other specific market sectors. Certainly, as I discussed earlier, the potential for WSJ.com assets to benefit from this new relationship will loom large, as will integration with Factiva content and platform assets, but in looking at the other assets of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, including its news wires, one can see more than just a few extra sources for an already robust business intelligence platform.

What the Dow Jones-Generate acquisition deal represents in its broader context is a dawning era in business information in which new methods of rapid content aggregation and analysis from any potential source are creating a powerful new real-time economy with a high potential payoff for both enterprises and publishers. Much is still made about having leverage through licensable content. When the content's truly unique that's still a reasonable premise, but too often aggregators rely on commoditized content that doesn't enable businesses to get real execution advantages in business over their competitors.

By providing semantic analysis of freshly harvested information from the Web and other sources and mapping it to the relationships that an individual or an enterprise have that can respond to that analysis the combined capabilities of Dow Jones and Generate create powerful new real-time opportunities for creating value from those insights with specific business partners and clients. It's not so unlike what happened in financial markets as they provided more real-time harvesting and analysis of market data and news, but now business information sources from a far wider array of souces can provide similarly valuable and executable insights for a far broader array of business professsionals. If personal relationships drive the highest margins in business, then tools such as Dow Jones' new stable of business intelligence tools from Generate are going to be a key factor in helping professionals to harvest value from those relationships when they're the ripest for the picking.

Dow Jones is not completely alone in this, of course: I reviewed recently Yellowbrix's very intriguing value-add semantic analytics that map trends in news to financial markets and InsideView's semantics-driven sales tools driven by online news sources, subscription databases and relationship management tools are recent examples of how broader real-time insights into events affecting companies and people are driving the value in today's publishing. Much of this value comes not from externally licensed content from from the added value provided by the real-time analysis of this content regardless of its source. Over time the time series data built up through these kinds of services will provide other aspects of unique value for licensing, but these will be secondary to the ability to provide real-time context that can lead to deals at the most important point in time. It's like watching the financial market data business being reborn for the entire range of opportunities for executing business in a wide variety of business sectors. The future of business information is taking shape today - and it's very interesting and high-value stuff. Here's to very interesting times ahead indeed.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, Dow Jones, Generate, market data

I was a bit nonplused to read an article in ZDNet today about InsideView's newly launched SalesView platform that just didn't seem to "get" what business information services are all about - much less what they are now starting to accomplish within some of the leading sales force automation platforms. Kind of strange, given the power found in the particular application that InsideView has launched.

InsideView has dubbed the mapping of business contact relationships to filtered content from Web harvesting and premium content sources inside collaborative software as "socialprise," a good label that describes how business information is gaining value in key contexts through aggregation and value-add services.

SalesView accomplishes this with content from the Web, from social networking services such as LinkedIn and Facebook and, at premium levels, major subscription databases such as Hoover's, D&B, Jigsaw and Reuters. Similar in general concept to Dow Jones's new Generate acquisition but more oriented towards existing Sales Force Automation platforms, SalesView filters incoming content to determine if it represents actionable triggers in a sales and marketing relationship with existing and potential clients and partners and maps it to relationships harvested from personal networks from both online services and SFA services.

The headline in the ZDNet article asks, "SalesView from InsideView: feature or product?" Apparently they weren't too tied in to how different the mission of most SFA platform providers is compared to most business information providers today. The data that most companies load from their internal databases or third party service into a sales force automation platform is just a starting point for people trying to figure out what they should be concentrating on in their sales, business development and marketing efforts.

Think of SFA contact records as the file cards onto which much be attached the prioritization of these targets and the intelligence that can help people understand who's really ready to move on business today. SFA tools don't provide those kinds of capabilities at all. It takes rich content, filtered through tools that will tell a person who's likely to be in a place where a call would be productive, to tell someone whether it's worth using that contact information in the SFA tool. Yes, from a platform standpoint this may look like a "feature," but if it's a feature that drives the key activities needed to generate revenues, then what's really important, the content "feature" or the software "product"?

SalesView takes a different approach from Generate's G2 platform, focusing more on aggregating a wider potential array of sources and social networks into a number of popular SFA platforms, as opposed to G2's focus on its own standalone application and enterprise API. Both approaches have their advantages, but the SalesView platform is nice in that it offers people hooks into a number of the business information services that they're already probably using to manage business social networks and to acquire information about businesses - all filtered through their sales trigger analysis software.

Generate may have gone down the road further in terms of building its own high-quality company and person information from Web-harvested sources, but SalesView enables people to leverage their own personal networking content very effectively for those who are already making use of social media services, while still being able to leverage intelligence from both online sources and subscription databases very effectively. For those companies that fit this usage profile, it looks to be that SalesView can give them a very cost-effective leg up on integrated real-time business intelligence that can yield greatly enhanced productivity. Sure sounds like a content product to me.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, Dow Jones, Generate, insideview, Social Media, socialprise

I was chatting with someone from Dow Jones' Enteprise Media Group at Buying and Selling eContent exhorting them to get more into virtual aggregation products while noting that folks from Generate were saying that a deal announcement with someone was eminent. This morning the deal news broke - with Dow Jones coming out the victor in a range of financing and exit options that Generate was considering. The Generate team will form the core of a new business unit at Dow Jones to be called Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence, to be headed by Generate President and CEO Tom Aley in a SVP slot with Darr Aley, his twin brother and EVP of Marketing for Generate, taking on a VP of Marketing role in this new business unit.

With a softening economy challenging Generate's value-add strategy for short-term growth, this is one of those win-win deals that you hope for and are glad to see when they come about. Dow Jones' Factiva business unit, the business information backbone for their Enterprise Media Group, has done well enough but had seemed mired in its efforts to move its business intelligence capabilities beyond traditional aggregation of licensed content for most of its clients. The acquisition of Generate provides Dow Jones three critical springboards into a much more robust future based on The New Aggregation concepts that we've advanced here at Shore for many years.

The first springboard is the virtual aggregation capabilities that Generate's web harvesting provides. Generate, unlike some other Web harvesting tools for business information, has focused very heavily on ensuring that harvested data is cleansed and de-duplicated before releasing it into its databases. This doesn't make their data perfect, but with more and more institutions making their own Web publishing the "golden source" for publishing business information it does give them a distinct advantage in both update cycles and overall breadth of content quality that will accrue as more and more data gets released into the Generate/DJ databases. Now Dow Jones has an engine to build an independent and powerful source of business information that will not have to rely as heavily on licensed content sources.

The second springboard is a very robust intelligence front-end in Generate's G2 platform, which combines semantic analysis of incoming content for events that may trigger specific types of deal-oriented activities with a very rich and well-designed business intelligence application and API toolkit that has enabled Generate to build a market very quickly for its high-end business intelligence services. G2's integration of watch lists for both companies and people combined with real-time triggers will give Dow Jones a real-time business intelligence service far more powerful than what is currently in their quiver - with Factiva content helping to add value rapidly to the application.

The third springboard into making virtual aggregation a reality for Dow Jones is Generate's gClick tool, which enables content on people and companies served up from Generate's database to appear in a pop-up window or other Web display with a click of a browser-embedded icon or a Web page link. An entire page or a highlighted section of content can be analyzed by gClick to determine which companies and people are present and a customized dossier is prepared and displayed automatically. While the media applications of this tool have proven to be useful for some of Generate's clients, expect this to be particularly useful in enterprises where it's easier to manage features like this on a standardized basis. With many enterprise Web portals and search engines failing because they don't provide the right content in the right context this capability can help to build a foundation for many virtual aggregation services within the enterprise.

Put these three capabilities together and you have a huge leap forward in Dow Jones' ability to add value through business intelligence services beyond its traditional base of users. While they had been making some new inroads with their Factiva SalesWorks tools into the line managers who need more value from business information the data sets that Factiva alone could provide were not particularly better than any other set - with Web content left to the side in raw form. With its Generate acquisition Dow Jones has set the stage for a new era of growth in business information services based on the real-time, all-the-time world of Web content combined with sophisticated analysis that can transform this information into highly actionable business insights quickly and effectively. My congratulations to all involved: business information just got a lot more fun again.

UPDATE: A couple of extra thoughts that have been rattling around in my head today. The gClick feature will be a very nice proprietary advantage for the WSJ.com site in time, although it's likely that they'll still market the feature to non-competitive media outlets. Also, if you think of how the G2 platform has done well in financial markets to date it makes a wonderful complement to other DJ products in this sector - providing a new real-time oriented service that need not mess with stock exchange market data to make an impact on the markets. Neat.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, Generate

There are some basic patterns that seem to repeat themselves through the publishing industry, one of them being the relative attractiveness of subscriptions in a down economy and the relative attractiveness of ad-supported publishing in an up economy. With the global economic cycle already beginning to cut into online advertising money and that money spread across more high-quality online inventory than ever, it's not really a surprise that there's some reaffirmation of subscription models at Dow Jones. As noted in The Wall Street Journal, News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch underscored in comments at the Davos World Economic Forum that Dow Jones would be continuing a subscription component to the WSJ's online offering, even as it expands its free offering to a far broader online audience.

Dow Jones has little to lose and quite a bit to gain by trying this "guns and butter" approach to online monetization. With about two million affluents and influential online subscribers, WSJ offers strong demographics to advertisers who would otherwise be left to compare only WSJ's open Web assets with other quality online content. WSJ will hold its own with those competitive products, to be sure, but why toss out higher ad rates if you don't have to? By expanding both search engine exposure to much of WSJ's online content and continuing to build an online club for elites there's reason to think that the Journal is headed towards a comparatively robust year of growth.

The main question is, what will keep the subscribers coming back for more? We've mentioned in earlier posts that the subscription component could be used to leverage WSJ's upscale demographics in any number of social media-oriented efforts, as well as to offer financial analysis tools that would one-up offerings made available by Yahoo! Finance as well as premium offerings from Morningstar and other online suppliers. Whatever the changes they need to be oriented more towards a younger generation's needs if they are to use subscription revenues for anything more than the temporary bulwark that the TimesSelect premium experiment turned out to be.

Any way you look at it it's not clear that there's a core of traditional editorial content from any news publisher that's likely to sustain growth in online subscriptions in the long run. The tricky job that Dow Jones has on its hands is to project the value of its brand more globally via ad-only content whilst maintaining some sense of value in its exclusive subscription product. Dow Jones has much to gain in retaining its subscription model as it expands ad-only content, but they will be challenged to keep the value of the Wall Street Journal brand high unless there are new styles of content that can build on the existing brand's loyalty.

Labels: advertising, Dow Jones, Monetization, Murdoch, subscription

Were we surprised that Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino will be stepping aside for News International executive chairman Les Hinton, key exec for New Corp's business and mainstream news operations?

Nope.

Was it any small surprise that Gordon Crovitz, President of Dow Jones Consumer Media and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, would be leaving along with Zannino?

Hardly.

With a changing of the guard at the top of News Corp expected and Murdoch itchy to start transforming his new property to compete with other quickly moving global news outlets it only makes sense for Richard and Gordon to move on ASAP. This is of course no reflection on their ability to guide one of the world's premium business content brands into a highly profitable stance in the business media marketplace. This duo has to be credited with managing to maintain both an institution and a highly profitable and growing audience through some of the most challenging times in publishing history. But the new boss in town rivals New York Yankees baseball "Boss" George Steinbrenner for his fixation on goals and results. Lip service to tradition, yes, but hitting your mark comes first.

The goal: build the most sophisticated and recognized global brand of business news that can be wrapped around leading executives' decision-making processes in whatever context matters most to them and to monetize it in whatever way hits the bottom line best. Pride in subscription online portals and "the value of real journalism" be damned, it's the first to crack this converging marketplace that wins the gold. And Murdoch is not alone. With Reuters teaming up with The New York Times' International Herald Tribune to deliver business news in IHT's global daily news outlet and Bloomberg, LP choosing a media investments specialist for its top spot the marketplace for business media and information is shaping up to be increasingly complex. Add on The New York Times' stellar traffic growth since dropping its subscription firewall
and it's anyone's game to build a new dominant position in business news and information services.

The odd leg out in this discussion so far, though, is Dow Jones Enterprise Media, AKA Factiva plus the remnants of Dow Jones' enterprise feeds business. The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow. No word yet as to whether Clare Hart is expected to move on, but with relatively little expertise within News Corp in managing subscription business information database services she may wind up being a well-positioned player - that is, if some of the industry's other merging interests don't tantalize her more than playing NewsCorp Survivor. With an established global base of clients Factiva is likely to become an important fulcrum as NewsCorp tries to leverage its way further into global business information circles.

There's a lot yet to unfold in this fascinating merger, but already we can see that promises of journalistic integrity in Murdoch's world view are not synonymous with the status quo for journalists in any sense of the word. In may ways this may turn out to be a great plus, as Dow Jones journalists get to play out their careers in an increasingly sophisticated global marketplace. In the meantime it's time for U.S. business journalists of all stripes to recognize that as much as they have been biting the hand that's fed them pretty well all these recent years this hand has been mightily slow in creating better long-term career options for them. Certainly not everyone will be happy with these impending changes at Dow Jones and some "old guard" insight is surely going to be lost along with this increased global nimbleness but there's no time to waste if NewsCorp is to make the most of the Dow Jones family of content brands. In this landscape the purity of outdated methods can be no match for the purity of mastering new ones.

Labels: Bloomberg, Business Information, business media, Dow Jones, New York Times, News Corp, Reuters, Thomson

TechCrunch picked up over the Thanksgiving holiday on a rumor that Rupert Murdoch is pursuing the acquisition of the LinkedIn social network, a rumor later denied by News Corporation in The Telegraph but which has more than a grain of strategic sense in it nevertheless. [UPDATE: VentureBeat provides comfirmation with details that parallel our original post.] With Fox Interactive Media head Peter Levinsohn confessing in a Reuters interview that he finds Facebook "substantially more entertaining" than their own MySpace, there's an acknowledgement that MySpace is more about traditional media in many ways than it is about the multi-dimensional networking that Facebook enables for adults in professional and personal roles. While MySpace's upcoming personal feeds will no doubt give MySpace a little more boost against the rapidly growing strength of Facebook it's clear that Murdoch has many fish to fry when it comes to attracting adults who are at the core of many of his holdings' revenue streams.

A LinkedIn acquisition would help News Corp to fill in not only dwindling business-oriented classifieds revenues as more jobs and services are posted and found on social media networks but as well give them a well-established network of professionals that could become the focal point of hard-core business information services that bridge media and enterprise markets. It's not likely that Murdoch's Dow Jones division will come up with a social network on its own to compete with financial communities on Bloomberg and Reuters networks, but with LinkedIn they would have the ability to have a key tool to help professionals network and execute enterprise business well beyond investment bank trading floors. That's likely to bolster revenues as Factiva database subscription revenues face tough times in a softening economy.

To some degree this might also help to solve some of the question marks as to how best to leverage the highly valuable network of Wall Street Journal subscribers, many of whom no doubt are LinkedIn members as well. What better way to give this elite business publication a powerful business social network than to equip it with the most popular business networking tool available to date? It's doubtful that the WSJ crowd would ever take MySpace seriously as a social networking environment, no matter how much News Corp tries to re-engineer it, so why waste time building one from scratch as potential rivals gear up their own efforts for business-oriented social networking? All of a sudden the idea of premium content takes on a whole new meaning in this context that can transform the WSJ community into an elite social networking community. In the meantime LinkedIn infrastructure can be repurposed to give MySpace some more adult angles as well for younger people who are looking for a Facebook alternative.

There are realistic options for LinkedIn other than News Corp, but few that would be able to leverage all of LinkedIn's value to its maximum potential. It's a logical and potentially powerful marriage of social media via an organization that understands both media and enterprise content value fluently. Murdoch is one of the few old-line publishers who really understands that the value in publishing is already way beyond the inventory that any one newsroom can create. In an era in which user-defined context is king, consider LinkedIn a key acquisition plum that's likely to be pulled out by a major player like NewsCorp sooner rather than later.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, LinkedIn, News Corp

Mercifully the carnival that has been the negotiations for News Corporation's acquisition of Dow Jones appears to have pulled out of town, with factions of the Bancroft family finally wrestled into line with the financial and managerial realities of the deal. One shudders to think as to whether any right-thinking corporation would have considered an acquisition of Dow Jones any time soon after these machinations, so from at least that perspective the shareholders of Dow Jones should consider themselves very lucky indeed. But now that the glow of the spotlight is beginning to die down from this fracas, what's really going to happen with Murdoch's new acquisition?

As we said more than two months ago the benefits of having a global media company as a parent that has strengths in markets where Dow Jones needs to become stronger are the key to the real value in this deal. Murdoch's desire to have a major U.S. gem like Dow Jones in his crown will be overshadowed ultimately by his use of Dow Jones as an international brand that will allow him to become a more dominant player in influencing world markets. This will be especially important in U.K. Asian and Australian markets, where the online expertise and editorial strengths of Dow Jones can be used to build an English language global business media brand more able to dominate regional brands and Pearson's struggling Financial Times.
But it's also likely that the Dow Jones brand will be able to find footholds in other markets over times with Murdoch's leverage.

The missing piece from this empire is a strong presence in real-time trading markets. But given the cutthroat nature of those technology-driven markets that are not easily adapted to the managerial strengths of the Dow Jones organization this may be an omission worth skipping for the time being. As financial markets split into highly automated trading venues and opportunities driven by high-end market analysis tools the opportunity for Dow Jones to make better use of its strengths is not likely to solidify for some time in the wake of Thomson's pending deal for Reuters. A conjectural bid for Bloomberg is not really even worth considering at this point, though in two years' time it might be a reasonable play for NewsCorp if Murdoch's focus on succession takes his portfolio into more diversified channels.

While there is doubtless a fair amount of sadness in some hearts at Dow Jones as a proudly American brand passes to offshore ownership it's also an opportunity to reflect on the need for American business media in general to become more adept at managing international footprints. A weak dollar makes this a difficult time to buy in to those markets, so the wave of international acquisitions of U.S. targets this year at favorable exchange rates makes it that much harder for U.S. B2B media companies to make progress in overseas markets. But times will change - if B2B media companies take on a Murdoch-like view of the world that goes beyond the local golf courses and into more international circles of power. In the meantime congratulations to everyone involved in the Dow Jones deal - I hope that you get a few days off to forget about it all.

Labels: Business Information, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, Murdoch, News Corp

The announcement of Factiva's deployment of improved integration capabilities via browser-based Web applications is being heralded as a major leveraging of Web 2.0 technologies to improve Factiva content delivery. The new tools allow Factiva SalesWorks content to be integrated into enterprise portal applications via user-embeddable widgets into Web 2.0 platforms using technologies that eliminate having to deal with feeds into back-end server applications. This is an important step forward into allowing both enterprise users and development teams to use SalesWorks content where it matters most to them, without having to rely on expensive and time-consuming custom integration efforts. SalesWorks offers a good range of content, but as enterprises turn to a wide range of CRM applications, Wikis and other platforms as their "go-to" business information platforms services such as Factiva have to move quickly and effectively to make their content a part of those user-centric environments.

While these new integration capabilities are hardly revolutionary by overall industry standards they do represent an important step forward by a major enterprise content aggregator to move further away from its own platform to offer customers the ability to put their content where they will find it to be most useful. Much of the focus on enterprise workflow integration by aggregators has been on creating comprehensive tools to solve specific information retrieval problems. By moving to browser-based content embedding technologies aggregators can move more quickly to bring their content to users via the applications that matter in their workflows already on a day-to-day basis.

This is a sword that cuts both ways, of course: in ceding the complete workflow to other applications integrators trade off more complete integration for more quick market penetration. As penetration is the key to both retaining subscription bases and expanding opportunities for add-on marketing efforts it pays to go the embeddable route - a picture that will become more clear to more aggregators in time. Aggregation is no longer such a rarefied game - both Factiva and other content aggregators will face increasing competition from technology-oriented companies that know how to provide value-add functionality on top of many different types of business information content sets. It's a race of sorts to see how providers of licensed content sets can switch to a strategy that will get embedded in desktops securely before these other providers gain the upper hand. In the meantime Factiva has made a strong move to claim their place in the new widget-oriented enterprise desktop as quickly as possible.

Labels: aggregation, Business Information, Dow Jones, embedding, Factiva, widgets

paidContent.org notes the Dow Jones boardroom resignation of Dieter von Holtzbrinck in protest over the pending News Corp deal, but away from the acquisition soap opera are some interesting details culled from the recent Dow Jones earnings report. Though overall earnings are down notably online revenues are up 5 percent and paid subscribers to The Wall Street Journal Online grew 23.6%, buoyed in part by a USD 99 combo package for the print and online edition. These are good numbers at a time in which business news is challenged in all directions by new sources. Think of the WSJ as the world's largest country club, a point of social distinction that allows one to join an elite (kind of) group for very nominal greens' fees.

It's a model that social media plays will be leveraging more in search of high-value focused market segments, which begs to some degree when WSJ will be doing more to integrate community features into their platform. I have great respect for Gordon Crovitz and his business acumen, but the WSJ's shyness on social media is likely to leave additional "gated community" revenues to others in time. And perhaps time will be the factor - they aren't growing any more WSJs any time soon, as Rupert Murdoch knows very well, so Crovitz and others with deeply entrenched media brands seem content to let their content become contextualized elsewhere. A little imagination is in order here to consider how to build a new clubhouse at this online country club - for premium fees, of course.

Meanwhile over at Dow Jones Enterprise Media the Factiva buyout makes things look temporarily rosy on the unit's top line but Factiva's compartively thin profits dragged down the unit's operating margins to 23.2 percent. The Enterprise Media unit is another example of where Clare Hart does a magnificent job of talking about Web 2.0 but so far has not really touched its potential to change the fundamental profitability of a licensed content aggregation business. By contrast Thomson Financial's recent deal to incorporate executive background briefings and private company profiles from Generate is a key foray to use Web content to build premium content revenues via direct extensions to their core content sets. The New Aggregation that we talked about a few years ago, in which publishers and aggregators must embrace Web-generated content and contexts aggressively to generate better margins, is now being embraced by key business information providers very aggressively.

Hopefully the Factiva buyout will enable Dow Jones to infuse their Factiva investment with more capabilities incorporating Web content that will improve both margins and content quality - once News Corp acquisition formalities have settled down. In the meantime here's hoping that Dow Jones' model for online and enterprise success continues to broaden both coverage and online audience engagement.

Labels: Dow Jones, earnings, Factiva, financial information, Generate, Thomson

Our take on a brewing counter-offer for Dow Jones, thoughts on how Wikipedia's Current Events editing challenges news organizations to take a more objective view and ECNext's Manta uses social media concepts to update business profiles online.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, ECNext, Manta, shoreviews, Social Media, video, Wikipedia

While Nexis tinkers with the edges of its market footprint Dow Jones's Factiva unit is pushing forward with two key enhancements that are designed to change the scope of what business information users are likely to expect from their suppliers. Dow Jones' upgrades to its Synaptica taxonomy management services enable different taxonomies for different user groups - an essential tool for adapting business information into departmental functions - and enhanced semantic support for RDF, SKOS and OWL semantic standards that will enable Dow Jones clients to process and interpret a wider range of content types more effectively - including multimedia content. No small surprise, then, that the other announcement from Dow Jones is a deal with EveryZing (recently renamed from PodZinger) to integrate audio and video content from major suppliers such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, BBC Radio and other major suppliers. EveryZing's already heavily categorized video content includes news from around the world in several major languages, making it a natural for integration into the Factiva set of general news and research content, enhanced all the more by the increased semantic prowess of their semantic tools.

Video is certainly all the rage on the Web and gaining steam within the enterprise as network backbones and security infrastructures are tuned to deal with more pervasive video consumption. Dow Jones' aggressive positioning of its integration capabilities combined with timely multimedia content will position them well as a supplier of both content and integration tools as enterprises think more seriously about how to integrate business-ready video into their portals and collaborative tools. In a sense this gives Dow Jones additional leverage against the increasing penetration of services such as Google's enterprise search appliances that enable both enterprise content and content from the Web that will be backed by their "Universal Search" capability to make its way into corporate Webs.

But the "catch-up" nature of the EveryZing deal underscores the degree to which Google is developing business-ready content sets far broader than Dow Jones and other business information suppliers. Dow Jones, Nexis and others hope to continue to pull trumps on Google with more select licensed sources at their disposal tuned to very specific enterprise audiences. And with sales and support staffs that have been knee-deep in enterprise needs and solutions for years folks like Dow Jones have some important edges in being able to integrate content effectively into enterprise platforms. Yet one wonders how much longer search-oriented business information suppliers such as Dow Jones are going to be able to leverage their licensed content sets to stave off more direct competition from Web-oriented integration specialists such as Google. Is Dow Jones' Factiva unit a search and taxonomy company with licensed content or a subscription database service with some nifty integration tools? Neither answer may be sufficient as stronger competitors enter the stage with better generic answers to these questions and others with more sector-specific answers. But for now, kudos to Dow Jones for keeping Factiva fresh and relevant.

Labels: Audio, Business Information, Dow Jones, Factiva, Semantic Web, Taxonomies, video

Two weeks ago when we covered the offer by Rupert Murdoch to have NewsCorp take over ownership of Dow Jones there was plenty of froth from the Bancrofts and some media pundits that this was a "no way" proposition, making us just a little nervous about our bullishness on the deal. Two weeks later the Bancroft family has issued their own press release independent of Dow Jones to indicate their intent to provide Dow Jones with new ownership and that they are willing to speak with News Corp as a potential suitor. Murdoch's patience and low-key approach seem to have brought him at least to a place at the table, if not one fully welcomed, as the Bancrofts seem to have concurred with our earlier conclusion that this is the right time to make a sale. While there is always the potential for a surprise bid from the wings it's probable that whatever solicitations the Bancrofts initiate for alternative offers will be more to provide emotional and intellectual backing to the very likely consummation of a deal with News Corp. Investor's Business Daily noted earlier regarding this deal the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu's writing that exercising patience often leads to victory in war. Perhaps the patience of both the Bancrofts and Murdoch are about to be rewarded with equal measure.

Labels: Bancrofts, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, Murdoch, News Corp

The Wall Street Journal reports on NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch's attempts to have conversations with the Bancroft family and other majority shareholders of Dow Jones - efforts that seem to have been spurned so far in spite of promises of editorial independence and limited control over hiring and firing. The article cites a Bancroft family member who saw Murdoch's offer as "the usual stuff" (one wonders what other "usual stuff" has been offered to Dow Jones in recent months). It's understandable that a company with the heritage of Dow Jones would balk at an offer that looks more like a hunt for a trophy wife on the surface than a well-planned merger, but in the details of Murdoch's offer is plenty of evidence that there may be some strong vision at work here.

Specifically of interest is Murdoch's willingness to invest in political and global economic coverage that would make The Wall Street Journal a more attractive international journal of record for business-minded people. In an increasingly global economy Murdoch sees no doubt in Dow Jones the core of an editorial and production team that has the ability to muscle into a more pronounced global leadership role in business media through localized print and online content. WSJ's readership is broad but not broad enough to allow Dow Jones to invest in a major global push effectively. It would be hard to imagine someone other than Murdoch who would have the cash, the influence and the market presence that would allow Dow Jones' brands to thrive in international markets to the extent that his tutelage would allow.

It's understandable that a proudly American brand like Dow Jones would resist Murdoch's advances but the sad fact of the matter is that U.S.-based business media services aimed at mass markets are not going to thrive in the years ahead unless they're more effective on a global scale. U.S. markets for business information are becoming far more data-intensive than overseas markets thanks to both the U.S. regulatory environment and the automated trading capabilities fed by that data. The in-depth journalism that is the specialty of Dow Jones will be focused more effectively on more opaque markets where insights beyond the reach of fair disclosure are needed more urgently. Other offers that are beyond this "usual stuff" may come along at some point but one wonders whether Dow Jones will have the market leverage at such an undetermined point in time to leverage its brand's strength as effectively as it can today. They may not like the suitor but Murdoch is leading with a strong suit that should be considered with a hard-nosed look at the spreadsheets as well as with a journalist's gut.

Labels: Business Information, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, media, News Corp, Trends

CNBC Reports along with others on the USD 5 billion cash offer from NewsCorp to acquire control of Dow Jones & Company from the Bancroft family and other majority shareholders. Dow Jones has long been in the eyesights of Rupert Murdoch who prizes the Wall Street Journal editorial page's outlook as much as its healthy subscription revenues and improving online profile, but certainly the recent reoganization at Dow Jones under CEO Richard Zannino doesn't hurt the prospects of Dow Jones getting a good asking price for a traditional news and business information service in a problematic market. The broader problem is what happens if the Bancrofts et al. come back and express interest. Certainly Bloomberg and other business information companies may be willing to put in an offer as a prophylactic move to ensure that another well-funded global competitor is not breathing down their necks, but few outside of NewsCorp would have a globally positioned product that would complement Dow Jones' existing media and business information capabilities effectively.

In the CNBC article Mort Zuckerman notes that NewsCorp's efforts to launch a cable business news channel to compete with offerings from CNBC, CNN and Bloomberg can make this a good fit, and it's a key point. Dow Jones' footprint in video has been very limited so a broadcast-savvy ownership provided by NewsCorp's Fox division would certainly position their editorial assets more effectively - especially in exploding online video markets. The same factor argues somewhat against a Bloomberg acquisition, as it already has a reasonably successful broadcast presence in both television and radio. But the ringer in all of this is business information. The Dow Jones Enterprise Media group under Clare Hart provides NewsCorp with an enterprise footprint that it lacks - and that it needs to give it a more interesting balance sheet compared to Reuters, which maintains growing media interests and solid enterprise interests.

All in all this may be the offer that the Bancrofts can at last not refuse. Expect considerations from Bloomberg and others to enter the picture in reaction to the bid but my sense is that this may be the time for Dow Jones to move into the hands of new ownership - and for Zannino and crew to benefit from a broader array of outlets through which to market their editorial products.

UPDATE: ABC News reports that Dow Jones rejected the NewsCorp bid within hours of its posting. The article mentions, though, that there is no statement from DJ indicating that it would not consider other bids from NewsCorp or other companies. This is not entirely surprising - Dow Jones is likely to want to remain in U.S. ownership, given its history - but my comments stand. This may have been the last best chance for Dow Jones to bail out under reasonably good conditions. Their online operations are doing well enough and they are finding more innovative ways to market non-financial content but the long-term trend for print revenues is not promising. To stay healthy more video production is a must.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, News, NewsCorp