Ulrike Langer of News Machines writes about how Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, decides what content to give access to artificial intelligence companies.
Langer writes, “Ask Dow Jones’s Chief Growth Officer Scott Havens whether readers might one day reach The Wall Street Journal through a chatbot instead of the front page, and he shrugs it off: You might read the Journal ‘through OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever.’ That’s his read on where the money will be. CEO Almar Latour is chasing a billion dollars in EBITDA (operating profit before financing and accounting deductions) by building what he calls the ‘stack’ — news, data, analytics and events stacked around a vertical such as energy or geopolitical risk, each layer feeding the next until customers ‘have work tools that lead back to Dow Jones, whether they know it or not.’
“In that model the articles are the top of a funnel, not the treasure. The treasure is a twenty-year database of how the best wealth managers in America invest, or fuel-pricing intelligence bought and wired across the whole company, or the geopolitical-risk analysis that clients build into their decisions. Latour’s test for what’s safe is whether it’s ‘truly proprietary’ — the things his journalists ‘pick up in the corridors of power’ that no bot can scrape. The other half of the test is how deeply a customer’s workflow is wired into Dow Jones. Let an agent summarize today’s WSJ story. It can’t summarize the database underneath, and it can’t replace the tool a bank has already built its process around.”
Read more here.
