Dow Jones CEO touts strong second quarter

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Dow Jones & Co. CEO Les Hinton sent out the following e-mail to the company’s employees on Thursday:

Dow Jones fiscal second-quarter results again showed profits and progress as we build a modern model for the news and information business.

Within News Corp.’s second-quarter results yesterday were some encouraging numbers from Dow Jones. Total revenue rose 7% in the three months ended Dec. 31. Circulation revenue jumped nearly 14% companywide, and advertising revenue rose 10%.

It was the fifth consecutive quarter of increasing ad revenue for The Wall Street Journal. Barron’s, MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal Asia also posted sharp increases in ad revenue. Our enterprise businesses appear to have turned a corner in the quarter, and we are seeing a more favorable trend there.

We continue to invest in our products, particularly those aimed at enterprise customers. Dow Jones FX Trader launched this week. It represents a major opportunity to extend our share of the huge market for foreign-exchange information and to build our Financial Markets business.

This is another important initiative for Dow Jones, which has been growing by investing in content. Greater New York, WSJ Weekend and other initiatives have demonstrated we can turn quality content into business success. DJ FX Trader is an investment in content and technology too. It is a cross-company collaboration on news, technology and business. It brings together the news from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires with advanced technology from Dow Jones Financial Markets. It leverages the expertise of many people and many products to create something exceptional and new.

We had many accomplishments in the quarter. If this abbreviated list isn’t comprehensive, it is nonetheless representative:

• The Journal again held its position as the No. 1 newspaper in the U.S.
• WSJ. Magazine announced it will publish more frequently, going from six issues in 2010, to nine in 2011 to 10 in 2012.
• Journal editions in Europe and Asia expanded their lifestyle content and launched iPad apps.
• In Hong Kong, the Journal launched a section specific to that thriving metropolis. In Japan, thousands downloaded the Journal’s Japanese-language iPhone app  when it debuted there.
• The Journal app for Android debuted to much praise. PC Magazine said: “There is currently one good app for Android tablets. It is the new Wall Street Journal app, and it’s just beautiful…”
• Wall Street Journal Professional Edition announced a custom version tailored for senior financial executives. WSJ Pro received a Codie award this month for best news service. The Codie is a peer-recognition award and among the most prestigious in the software industry.
• At the Local Media Group, a shift to paid online access is driving increases in circulation revenue. All LMG papers now charge for their digital editions, and the results are exceeding expectations.
• In Princeton, we turned the switch on the first of two parts to our solar-power system. We now are generating power from 2.5 megawatts of what later this year will be a 4.1 megawatt system, one of the biggest such corporate sites in the U.S.

We want to continue this progress. We want to continue investing in the future by investing in content and technology and in the vitality and relevance of brands ranging from the Journal to Factiva, VentureSource, Watchlist and more.

The media business moves at digital speed now. At that rate, the future comes faster every day. So we must be restless in pursuit of tomorrow’s readers and customers. We must be relentless in competition for screen space, eyeballs and advertisers. And we must be as diligent in managing our costs as we are in choosing our investments and thus our future.

Thanks to everyone for a successful quarter. These results show what a great company and great colleagues are capable of.