Metadata is one of those terms that's likely to get traditional publishers' eyes glazing before you've even finished saying it, but it happens to be the content that's going to determine much of what powers profitability in publishing over the next decade. Broadly speaking metadata is the categorization and tagging of content that enables it to be referenced easily and to reference other content easily. If the easy money to be made in searching documents on the Web has been made already by Google, the next generation of publishing services will be providing tools than enable more structure to be added to content, both for providing more rich content that search engines will like and to provide enough richness that people looking at a metadata-enriched Web page won't have to go hunting via search engines for related content.

Reuters has launched recently their Calais open API initiative that holds great promise for them becoming a major player in leveraging metadata generation as a tool to put them at the heart of increasingly structured Web content. Calais provides tools that will enable publishers and applications developers to pass their content through a content analysis engine provided by Reuters' ClearForest semantic content processing tool and to get well-structured metadata returned for free. What's the payback for Reuters? To be the first to have this information, of course. With its centuries-old traditions of breaking news and real-time market data, Reuters is far from being a stranger to the value of being the first one obtaining critical information.

In helping the Web to gain semantic structure Reuters can become in theory via Calais the one best suited to help people take advantage of thst structure. Will this become a reality? While it's not likely to take off quickly I think that it's likely that Calais may enjoy a very comfortable position as a pioneer in open metadata generation for some time. The more time in which they can build up metadata without much opposition - lots of people will still be in the "old media" mindset of trying to quantify short-term profits for such a move - the more time that they will have to build value-add services that build on both the information's value as a real-time update stream as well as its value as a tool to enable people to make sense of an ever-expanding Web. Metadata also helps search engines and contextual ad services to match content to queries more effectively, so the What's-In-It-For-Me might be very valuable to publishers, especially publishers of social media who don't have the budget to afford their own semantic metadata generation systems.

Publishers place a lot of emphasis on copyright, but as the financial market data business has shown through the years copyright is of little value if you can't get your content to the right people in time for it to make a difference to people. Focusing on metadata will enable Reuters to start indexing the Web in a more organized manner and to use that indexing to develop information products that will become in time at least as valuable as those that it has developed for the financial securities marketplace. It's no accident that Reuters is using a silhouette of a pigeon in the logo for Calais. Julius Reuter made his first stab at electronic publishing by closing the gap between telegraph stations carrying stock quotes by tying them to carrier pigeons. Sometimes filling the gaps in content services that others wait to get filled can have profound consequences.

Labels: calais, ClearForest, metadata, Reuters, Semantic Web

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

Reuters reports the news story on CNN's elimination of Reuters as a major supplier of news and video footage, but the story behind the story provided on the Reuters MediaFile weblog gets to some of the meat of the matter. An internal CNN memo surfaced by MediaFile from Editorial Director Richard Griffiths details the sudden and troublesome transition that CNN must manage. The termination of using Reuters content is immediate and global and must include purging clips of Reuters video footage from archived video segments. Though the official story from CNN that it is deciding to make "significant investments" in its own news gathering operation to counter the loss of Reuters content there is some speculation that this is more of a cost-cutting measure or a "play tough" negotiating stance on the contract for syndicated Reuters content.

The truth is probably somewhere in between these two stances. It's hard to imagine that CNN, which has relied strongly on Reuters content for most of its existence, is going to be able to fill the gap easily for coverage lost through dropping Reuters, especially as it impacts their archives so deeply. If this is a strategic move, then one would think that the strategy would have accounted for these losses more smoothly.

To some degree the claim that news feeds and video footage from suppliers such as AP can help to fill the gap may be a major part of the CNN strategy, but the larger factor seems to be how the increasingly context-dependent nature of Web content is changing how content brands are managed online. In dropping a major syndication source such as Reuters CNN is acknowledging that aggregating content from other premium branded suppliers does not necessarily help a publisher to score well in metrics managed by comScore and other audience measurement services that look increasingly at how content gets consumed away from a portal.

This is underscored by portals such as CNN making more aggressive use of their own feeds to users via RSS, search engine positioning and other techniques that are putting their content into on-the-fly contexts that users value more. In this sense, a content brand is built around what it does for an audience in the contexts that they care about most - which may or may not be the brand's parent portal.

While this gives Reuters a bit of a bloody nose in the short run it's also an acknowledgment that their strategy of using Web syndication partners sparingly is paying off to some degree as its own brand begins to gain more prominence through search engines and its increasingly sophisticated portal. However CNN's willingness to stick with content from AP and other wire services may also indicate that Reuters' once-dominant international position in news gathering is eroding to the point that it is becoming harder to position its news effectively in consumer markets. Reuters has also lagged behind AP in seeking out social media partners to build context for its content, and unlike AP does not have the advantage of a membership-driven network that relies on AP in many instances to drive branded news portals in many local markets.

All of this begs a very delicate question: is the Reuters news brand going to be strong enough to survive alone in an era in which traditional syndication is experiencing major challenges? By moving its consumer Web operations away from partners such as CNN over the past few years Reuters has tried to innoculate itself against this very question through its quest to build up non-syndication revenues through advertising and other types of business deals. But with more global news sources than ever before and a surge of user-generated content gaining more authority it is becoming ever-harder for Reuters to define that brand, a move that may be complicated by the eminent takeover of Reuters by Thomson.

Consider, for example, the fact that the far more interesting analysis of this particular story appeared on the Reuters MediaFile weblog. MediaFile is an excellent blog, but it's hardly the only one of its kind. Being able to define their brand effectively online whilst contending with both traditional and non-traditional competitors that can be exposed the the global communications afforded by the Web is going to be an ongoing challenge for Reuters and other major wire services. For now consider CNN the winner in this battle as it gains more freedom to build its brand through online channels for its text and video content, but consider both parties having to scramble to make their news strategies fly in a world of contextual content branding.

Labels: aggregation, CNN, News, Reuters, syndication

As Thomson prepares to subsume the assets of Reuters many eyes are on the impact to financial content markets from this historic merger. But with Reuters CEO Tom Glocer expected to take the overall helm at Thomson the more important impact might come from the lessons that Glocer is prepared to apply to Thomson's other divisions. With decades of experience in both real-time and media markets Glocer may have the opportunity to transform Thomson into a far more agile player in global markets for business information.

Click here to read the full News Analysis

Labels: Bloomberg, Deals Partnerships and Sales, News Analysis, Reuters, Thomson

The wires are ablaze with takeover rumors, the leading buzz being about an offer from Thomson to acquire Reuters. Reports put NewsCorp in the race as well, but this sounds like a tepid
"Plan B" as a backup to Murdoch's intents with Dow Jones. The matches in a Thomson-Reuters merger are fairly obvious - Thomson gets Reuters' low-latency content delivery and automated trading platforms for the investment bankers that they've been unable to woo in quantity as well as online ad revenues from Reuters' media offerings, Reuters gets fingers into the securities industry "buy side" and retail operations - but I wonder whether EC regulators are going to feel comfortable with such a dominant combination. On a global basis that would leave Thomson and Bloomberg as the only really viable content alternatives for supporting large-scale securities trading operations.

Then again, perhaps that's all we need these days: the content that's driving securities transactions increasingly comes from sources outside of traditional vendor databases, leaving enterprise-oriented content vendors to perfect data plumbing and desktop tools. In a rapidly consolidating global securities marketplace two may be the magic number for the years ahead. With plenty of cash on hand for just such a takeover Thomson is in an excellent position to tuck away a revitalized but still-fragile Reuters team.

Two may also turn out to be the magic number in online content as Microsoft and Yahoo reopen talks to figure out a better fit. The Wall Street Journal reports that the shelved discussions have been brushed off in light of Google's now-leading Web presence. Yet again, this may be a merger or alliance of necessity. It would cede that Yahoo has largely missed the boat on enterprise content while Microsoft has stumbled with consumer content, even as Google has forged highly profitable paths into both arenas.

As in the securities marketplace for Thomson and Reuters the potential for a Microsoft-Yahoo alignment is as much about global competition as it is with any U.S.-oriented concerns. Asian and European markets are tipping Google's way in comparison to Yahoo and Microsoft, a trend that may be accelerated by Google's office automation tools that would allow developing nations just starting to come online to avoid the dominance of Microsoft Office tools as a prerequisite for playing in the digital economy. It's not clear that a Yahoo-Microsoft merger would help either party in developing markets but it may be powerful enough to act as a brake of sorts on further Google dealmaking and advertising alliances in developed markets.

In both of these potential deals, as well as in the potential acquisition of Dow Jones by NewsCorp, is the looming presence of gigantism in publishing that seems somehow unable to counteract the emerging trend of micropublishing. Huge collections of copyrighted content and patented technologies don't seem to be able to make a dent in the explosion of content developed by and for peers who are able to collaborate effectively with relatively little help from media giants. If there's anything to be said for any of these potential deals to deal with micropublishing it would be to acknowledge that Yahoo has been good at attracting user content while Microsoft has an improving stable of collaboration tools. On the enterprise side Reuters has decades of experience in enabling market conversations and promises to do moreso with emerging social media technologies.

But in both of these instances it may very well be the case that the distraction of merger politics would decelerate rather than accelerate these crucial efforts, leaving these companies further behind in the race to capture value from social media. The time may be right for these potential super-mergers and the resulting balance sheets are likely to look pretty healthy at the end of the day, but gigantism may prove to be a very temporary stop-gap measure in efforts to counteract changes in publishing that seem to favor small and medium publishing efforts that grow organically from open source tools and Web-based communications standards. Which bring us back, as always, to Google, which is glad to sell people valuable contexts for monetizing all of this content in whatever medium is of interest to marketers. I'll avoid the usual dinosaur-versus-mammal metaphor and just say that in a rapidly changing publishing ecology we're better off chasing the mammoth of contextual content value than focusing on building city-states of traditional publications that rely on a vanishing economy based on the value of copyrighted content.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Google, Microsoft, Reuters, Thomson, Yahoo

Today's announcement of the acquisition of ClearForest by Reuters highlights the shifting value proposition for business information services in the face of a marketplace that needs better information and ideas to compete in a real-time economy. ClearForest is one of the pioneers of mining content from Web sites, weblogs, corporate filings and other sources for businesses seeking to make sense of the sea of content that doesn't reside in neatly structured databases. ClearForest's mining and semantic analysis techniques allow unstructured content to tell tales that can lead to faster evaluation of financial opportunities, customer support issues and other mission-critical functions. ClearForest's modules that analyze news stories to develop data that can support automated securities trading as well, underscoring the need to treat the Web and internal unstructured sources as sources of content that can have immediate impact on operations and client perceptions as much as real-time financial quotes and news tickers have had in the past.

In other words when the world is one big database everything in that database can have a potential impact on business operations. Structured databases still matter for maintaining "golden sources" of content for specialized operations but the ability of technologies such as ClearForest to create on-demand content structure are placing more pressure on subscription database suppliers to deliver more value to their clients - value that relies oftentimes on unlicensed sources of unstructured content. It's a smart move by Reuters at a good time, picking up a company with mature technology that needed a more publishing-savvy management structure to accelerate its growth to the next level.

While the fit with Reuters' existing client base is obvious, one wonders how this will play against the recent jettisoning of Reuters' interest in its Factiva joint venture with Dow Jones. I wouldn't expect anything right away in a competitive direction from Reuters to circle back against Dow Jones and other general business information competitors but expect the already generalized capabilities of ClearForest to offer Reuters some very interesting leverage points that they may use to offer high-value services to business information consumers in the not too distant future.

Labels: ClearForest, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Reuters

If scholarly publishers are unsure as to whether social media can act as a cornerstone for research they should consider the plans of Reuters (Guardian) to introduce a private social media service for financial analysts later this year. While details are sketchy at this stage, it appears that Reuters will enable researchers and other financial professionals to post out analysis, data and other key information that can be picked up by Reuters subscribers on a premium basis. The 70,000-plus users already connected to the Reuters Messaging service are expected to provide the core audience for this service and will no doubt also provide the core of its contributors also. We'll see what the final product looks like but it's a shrewd move to leverage the power of Web publishing in a way that may yet unseat Bloomberg's messaging service as the core of financial dialogues in institutional trading circles.

It's this kind of advanced thinking about how audiences want to be connected to one another more than to publishers that's lacking from so much of the print-oriented publishing world. As the content industry becomes more real-time in its overall contours it should recognize that there is plenty of money to be made in enabling conversations amongst connected peers - enough to power the financial industry to record profits in 2006, by the way. Instead of looking at the bottom line of their clients more publishers need to look at their top lines and to consider how their services are contributing to overall revenues and profitability for their customers. If scholarly publishers were servicing Wall Street they'd be talking about the importance of ticker tape and carrier pigeons to investment banking. Publishers can do far better than that - and, yet again, Reuters has.

Labels: financial information, real-time, Reuters, scholarly publishing