Here are the comments made by Dow Jones & Co. CEO Lex Fenwick about The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones products at News Corp.’s investor relations day Tuesday:
We’re building a platform. We’re no longer a place where you come and read the news. When you come and read your news and look at our content, you’ll be able to start doing many other things on our site other than just reading the news. If you build applications and you become a platform, it does lots of magical things that help us. It increases the customer’s stickiness. It means that customers spend longer on the site than he or she previously was. It allows targeted advertising as you start to understand more about your customer and what their interests are or what they make care about. It will allow us to start building a networking business. And it also gives us this extraordinary leverage to what we call the institutional business, such as our customers are the buy side for a large part of the institutional business.
WSJ Portfolio launched 12 short weeks ago with little fanfare, little press, no great publicity, has already attracted in those 12 weeks, $12 billion of assets on to our platform. You can sync your brokerage account, you can look at your brokerage accounts in aggregate and look at their historical performance, and see all of the news and the content in real-time come to you over email from The Wall Street Journal, Barrons and MarketWatch.
WSJ Profile. This is coming to you in a couple weeks. And we know that you’re all going to be excited for you to have your own WSJ profile. Just think about that. You’re going to be able to load your research, load page posts, load information about yourself, show people your job, photographs of yourselves. And we will be able to build a network of like-minded people around the world into a community.
I just want to take a few more minutes to talk to you a little bit about our institutional business. We have 4 great brands today which some of you may be familiar with: Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva, a Dow Jones private equity CC database, and a Risk & Compliance business. We have recently brought all of these products together in a brand-new product code-named DJX, one product, one price and one standard contract. We already have in the institutional business, 41 of the world’s governments, many of the world’s central banks, 70 of the top Fortune 100 companies.
Some of the interesting things we’re going to be doing with DJX. First of all, we’re going to deliver this product over a browser, over the Internet. That means that when you write a function or an application, it immediately scales and works on a mobile device, such as a tablet or a mobile phone. So every single time we write a new function, we don’t have to rewrite it. It just works immediately on a mobile device. And in fact, if any of you would like to, we have a display out back where you can go and look. We’re going to build, and in fact, have already built and are using internally a proprietary messaging platform, a messaging platform where you can talk with each other but we don’t have any of the content at Dow Jones. It is strictly stored on your servers, and we can’t see what you’re saying to each other, that’s a first.
DJ Dominant. This is going to be one of the most disruptive newswires you have ever seen. This is the best of what The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones do every single day with a 2-minute time advantage. Robert talked about the great value of content and how it diminishes over time. Our customers at DJX will get the new DJ Dominant newswire. And so the 2,000 reporters around the world, when they break news or they have something that is unique, a scoop, analysis, that will go first to DJ Dominant.
Read the entire transcript here.
