Two years later, Clare Hart and her work for DJEM remains respected, but times have moved on, and, according to news reports, so has Clare as the enterprise media group at Dow Jones is being merged with their consumer media group. Dow Jones CFO Steven Daintith is taking over the Dow Jones COO role for now, an indication that a promotion into that role for Hart was not in the offing, so moving on seems like a good bet for her at this time. While some may read "glass ceiling" or "Murdoch loyalists" into this move, I think that it's more a matter of where companies like Newcorp need to bring business information services such as their Factiva property to gain more profitability. The direction for more profits from the licensed business media sources in Factiva's database is definitely towards the online media side of Dow Jones operations, a move that requires a different set of skills than those needed to make subscription business information database services successful in increasingly complex enterprise technology markets.

As I noted last October in ContentBlogger when the Wall Street Journal Pro Edition was launched, the rise of real-time Web news aggregation is accelerating the need for business media properties to become more effective news aggregators. At the time I noted that this would be a good move to make better use of Factiva assets in the Pro Edition framework, a move that seems far more likely to unfold now that the siloing of Factiva and other Dow Jones enterprise assets has been eliminated. Among those other assets that are more likely to emerge more aggressively in the new alignment is the Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence group (formerly Generate), whose alerts-oriented mining of news sources will have a broader market to tap into via the Pro Edition platform. Thinking of Newscorp's push to gain more online revenues from paid content sources, these types of premium services are ripe for better integration into ad-supported Dow Jones content.

This is also, of course, a somewhat back-handed way to say that there really isn't much of a strategy available to Dow Jones to increase revenues simply by waving a wand over broader segments of its existing online content. That ship sailed many years ago, as the WSJ Online edition gradually moved towards a large portion of its content being available online without a subscription. Their hope lies in providing more value in their offerings to individuals who may not have access to large subscription databases and sophisticated alerts services in their companies or who have found access to such services harder to justify under central information budgets. Moving to make DJEM resources more available via their consumer and "prosumer" platforms is a natural bridging strategy into these needs that can set up broader enterprise sales strategies over time.

In the meantime, though, this move is somewhat of an admission that the subscription database business for business news is a dying business model. Factiva has been as aggressive as any other player in business information in adding features and integration capabilities to its offerings, but at the end of the day the value-add from such services is drifting away to enterprise technology players more quickly than Factiva or other enterprise news aggregators can counter with improved products and services. There are just too many enterprise platforms in which this type of content is needed, creating broad product and feature disintermediation. Harvesting structured information from unstructured news and information sources is one approach that many enterprise content vendors are taking to counter this trend, but this alone ultimately doesn't justify the typical subscription structure for news databases.

You can see where this consolidation of enterprise-oriented resources with consumer media resources at Dow Jones may spell problems in focusing on enterprise opportunities, but at the end of the day the software and the thousands of licensed content sources that Dow Jones pays for have to grow profits for them more quickly if they are to be worth the price. With enterprises increasingly reluctant to pay for licensed content that offers few or no advantages over Web-accessible content, the Web is the only probable point of strong growth for old-line news aggregators. This may not be a pretty transition for many Factiva staff, but it's one of those long-delayed and necessary moves that will at least set the stage for more robust growth in enterprise markets for Dow Jones in the long run - even if that growth comes from non-traditional channels.

In a loose sense you can think of WSJ Pro as a Huffington Post for business professionals, a mix of content developed by WSJ staff writers and six sections of sector-oriented business news and information culled by WSJ editors from Factiva's extensive database and Web search infrastructure. However, using the extensive search-based analysis tools that Factiva has amassed, WSJ Pro will also provide its subscribers with the ability to unearth trends from its content. With a year of archived Factiva licensed content available along with two years of WSJ archives, WSJ Pro subscribers will be getting access to both content and trend analysis from in-depth premium business information sources unavailable in on the Web in many instances. Other must-have features such as custom alerts for email and mobile devices are also included in the subscription package, which will cost USD 49 a month.

Some are labeling the WSJ Pro package as a shot across the bow at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, which is a shot not too far off the mark, given that for decades many financial services companies have been able to negotiate similar price points from major financial information services for people off their trading floors, who used them mostly for news retrieval and casual price quotes on securities. WSJ Pro is aimed largely at such people, who are very Web-centric already in their information retrieval habits and looking for something a little more professional-grade. The trading arena itself uses more machine-executed trades and the remaining people on trading desks using very sophisticated analysis packages, so there are fewer people who can use the high-grade financial information products developed by companies like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. It makes sense, then, to focus on average professionals accessing better-than-the-Web information about business and finance who are willing to use a ad/subscription-supported prosumer product like WSJ Pro.

This move is also, of course, a way to counter some of the stagnation that Factiva faces in large-scale enterprise subscriptions. With central information budgets facing cutbacks in many of the enterprises targeted by Factiva and other major business information providers, using a more media-oriented model for delivering business information to specific individuals who are willing to pay for it offers Factiva a way to slide its content over into a new sales profile that can weather central budget cutbacks by appealing more to individuals who may be willing to carry a personal subscription to their products from other budget sources - perhaps even from their own pockets. Pioneering Web business information providers such as Hoover's have established the viability of this type of media/subscription model for years, so there's no reason to think that it won't succeed for Dow Jones as well.

So as much as professionals who already use Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters services may be targets for WSJ Pro, clearly a broader range of enterprise business information users may find the package to be appealing. The "prosumer" segment of business information is likely to be one of the fastest growing segments for business information use in the years ahead, as central information budgets recover slowly from the effects of the economic downturn while more aggressive executives in need of support for decision-making decide to up their personal investments in business information to close their knowledge gaps.

You can quibble a bit about the pricing, perhaps, which is not high compared to WSJ print packages but at a non-bulk price still a little high compared to some premium business information services, but no doubt WSJ has done their homework on this and is likely to meet their revenue goals with their "prosumer" WSJ Pro package. I have little doubt that this package will be a strong success - if but because both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are now scrambling to come up with business news assets that can help them to broaden their own offerings. When you get the incumbents moving quickly, you must be doing something right.

These are not the rosiest of times for financial information services, with fewer people using their services in the face of large-scale financial industry cutbacks, but out of adversity sometimes comes opportunity. While there are fewer professionals generating and consuming market analysis and opinion at investment banks and major buy-side firms, the thirst for market insights is as strong as ever, both among professionals and consumers of investments. That thirst may not be enough to float the salaries of as many investment bank analysts as in previous times, but there's plenty of money for financial information companies to fill in the gaps.

It's no surprise, then, that at virtually the same time there were deals announced by both Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg, L.P. to acquire two leading publishers of market insight and analysis. For Bloomberg the target is BusinessWeek, McGraw-Hill's prestigious but financially challenged business media outet, while Thomson Reuters is opting for BreakingViews.com, an online source of market insight and opinion that was growing very smartly until financial markets headed down last year. In both instances the timing of these deals certainly favors the buyers, who get to pick up assets at comfortable rates, but the ultimate outcomes of these deals may differ significantly.

For Bloomberg, the acquisition of BusinessWeek poses some major challenges but also unveils some major opportunities as well. BusinessWeek's print and online assets were redesigned recently to be targeted towards more online-oriented audiences, yet failed to attract major new audiences and advertisers. Taking the online know-how from the BusinessWeek team and its market analysts to combine it with a wealth of breaking news and opinion from Bloomberg may help Bloomberg to create a far more viable challenge to Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal, most especially in online markets. The rise of "prosumer" investors who expect greater depth from business information sources to help them manage private portfolios are obvious targets, people who will benefit not only from BusinessWeek editorial content but their sophisticated approach to online content design and management. This may help Bloomberg to extend towards the consumer spectrum of financial information services in print and online more effectively, with an overall global profile more similar to Dow Jones' consumer media news assets.

For Thomson Reuters, the acquisition of BreakingViews.com is a little more of a match for its core strengths, but also a bit less of a stretch towards direct competition with the consumer side of WSJ. BreakingViews focuses more than BusinessWeek on breaking in-depth company analysis, more akin to WSJ's Marketwatch portal but also more oriented than Marketwatch towards financial professionals. With a somewhat more "pro" than "prosumer" focus, BreakingViews may lack the broad consumer appeal of a BusinessWeek, but it's also more likely to command premium rates from advertisers seeking high-level executives and high net worth investors. While this may pose more of a challenge than Bloomberg may face in building a broader global consumer brand for financial information, it's also probably a focus that will provide returns more quickly and efficiently.

With strong arms already into broadcast television and radio, Bloomberg has an opportunity to create a deeper brand that can compete in broader markets, but it may be a long time for those markets to recover to the point that the investment may be worth it. This tends to argue towards BusinessWeek assets being refocused rapidly towards a prosumer profile more similar to what Thomson Reuters is seeking, but the shoe may not fit as gracefully. The media will buzz more for a while about the BusinessWeek acquisition, no doubt, given its penchant to feast on its own most prominent members whenever possible, but it seems as of Thomson Reuters may have opted for the better of these two deals from the perspective of building stronger information assets that can extend its strengths in both professional and consumer markets. Given the bargain basement price that Bloomberg has paid for BusinessWeek, at least they have very little to lose and plenty to gain.

For both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, they gain a wider array of assets to tailor to overlapping audiences for financial information markets that can smooth out revenue streams. It's been a grim period for financial markets, but market analysis is a key ingredient that can help financial information companies to ride out the gloomy periods until trade-related revenues pick up steam again.