Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, is planning a digital overhaul of its business-to-business activities with a new focus on improving revenues from specialist audiences, reports Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of The Financial Times.
Edgecliffe-Johnson writes, “Robert Thomson, Dow Jones’ editor-in-chief since News Corp took it over in 2007 and a former US managing editor at the Financial Times, said two editors had been assigned in September to an unidentified ‘special project’ focusing on new means of delivering industry-specific information to customers traditionally served by the group’s newswires and data products.
“‘It’s obvious to even the casual observer that the part of the business that has slipped a little is B2B. It’s fair to say that that’s the concern which most occupies my thinking at the moment,’ he said.
“The ‘hoo-ha and hullabaloo’ around the $5.6bn News Corp takeover focused attention on the Journal, ‘but the truth is that Dow Jones is both a B2B and a B2C [business-to-consumer] company,’ he added. Declining newswire revenues have left the Journal – in print and online – as Dow Jones’ largest revenue driver, but its other operations range from Barron’s, a financial weekly, to the Factiva news archive, databases of corporate information and 22 local US newspapers.
“Dow Jones’ B2B division contributed 60 per cent of group profits shortly before the takeover, but News Corp has not broken out the revenue or profit split since then.”
Read more here. Talking Biz News reported earlier this month that the special project would focus on foreign exchange coverage in a new platform.
