Dow Jones

The following message was sent out Wednesday from Dow Jones Newswires managing editor Neal Lipschutz:

“A storied Dow Jones career comes to an end April 11, as Bob Prinsky, Newswires’ executive director and senior editor for product development, gets set to retire. Bob is truly unique. He combines the skills of an excellent reporter and editor with the creativity and insight of a product development visionary.

“Over the past 43 years, Bob has covered every asset class, worked in five cities on two continents for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, hired or developed a number of journalists who went on to prominent positions, and devised some of Newswires’ most important value-added products. Bob is proud to claim the seventh-longest tenure of any of Dow Jones’s 8,000 active employees.

“Bob was hired out of the Columbia University School of Journalism in 1965 by WSJ’s New York bureau chief, Bill Clabby, to cover banking. Returning to his native Canada in 1966 to WSJ’s Montreal bureau and later that year to Ottawa, he greatly expanded the Journal’s output from Canada’s capital, penning leders and edit-page articles on Canadian political and economic issues. In 1969, he joined Newswires for the first time, covering the European Common Market from Brussels for the AP-Dow Jones News Service.

“In 1973, Bob returned to the Journal in London, where he covered Third World economics, including commodities and other subjects. In that position, Bob pioneered the daily roundup story of bond and forex news, in a column called (internally) ‘The Monetary Story.’ In 1977, he moved back to New York as the Journal’s commodities news editor, in which job he succeeded John Prestbo. In 1981, he was back with Newswires to stay, becoming the second managing editor of the Capital Markets Report.

“In 1988, Bob took the helm of the Dow Jones News Service. One of his signature early achievements in the post was to enormously increase the wire’s speed of delivery, from a poky 150 words a minute to 300 words. Bob recalls that Bill Clabby, again his boss, was worried that such an increase in speed would be too much for Ticker subscribers, most of whom back then read the entire wire as it scrolled across the screen; he directed Bob to phase in the speed increase to 225 words a minute before moving to 300. A short time later, Bob brought the wire to the then state of the art by boosting delivery speed to 9600 baud.

“In 1997, Bob took on the post of senior editor for product development. Among his many achievements in the post, three stand out:

• As part of his revitalization of the Capital Markets Report in 1998, he introduced MARKET TALK globally.
• As a way to promote loyalty among subscribers and improve ease of use, he devised Dow Jones NewsPlus in 2002.
• Most recently, he is the father of algo at Dow Jones, conceiving and creating the Elementized News Feed, Newswires’ most important engine of growth in 2008.

“While Bob is leaving his post as executive director and senior editor of Newswires, he isn’t departing altogether. In May, Bob will start a part-time consulting arrangement, which will allow him to continue to develop aspects of the algorithmic trading product, and to work on the project he’s long advocated to create a common coding taxonomy for the Enterprise Media Group and have it applied automatically.

“Please join me in thanking Bob for his many achievements and wishing him well.”