Former Daily Telegraph editor Ray Snoddy interviewed Dow Jones & Co. CEO Will Lewis about The Wall Street Journal and the newspaper industry.
Snoddy writes, “Then there is the WSJ+ club which now has more than 400,000 members who get benefits such as free ebooks from HarperCollins, like Dow Jones, part of the Murdoch empire.
“The aim is to turn as many subscribers into club members as possible and there are a total of 2.4 million subscribers across Dow Jones which includes business to business operations, desktop financial news services and Barron’s business magazine. The internal target is to lift the total number of subscribers to 3 million.
“Overall, Dow Jones produces 8,000 pieces of content a day and Lewis believes that to make that content more valuable, the company has to stop thinking in silos.
“‘You are not just writing for the Wall Street Journal. If we tailor and collate it for a geographic audience, we are on to something,’ muses Lewis.
“Despite its long history, Lewis believes there is still room for the Wall Street Journal newspaper to expand in many parts of the US, but the real goal is to try to get new readers to subscribe to the paper and at least one digital product. The evidence shows the combination increases loyalty and reduces churn.”
Read more here.
