Categories: OLD Media Moves

Making WSJ.com free would hurt other parts of Dow Jones

Kenneth Li and Robert MacMillan of Reuters report Friday that making The Wall Street Journal‘s web site free, which is the plan of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, would hurt the revenue of other Dow Jones & Co. properties such as Factiva and Dow Jones Newswires.

Li and MacMillan wrote, “But the plan could undercut Dow Jones’s Internet news archive Factiva and its Dow Jones Newswires, which offer Wall Street Journal content that is unavailable anywhere else, Dow Jones spokeswoman Christine Mohan said.

“Dow Jones’s Enterprise Media division, which includes Factiva and Newswires, contributed only 35 percent of revenue but accounted for 67.2 percent of segment operating income in the first nine months of the year.

“‘The exclusivity of Journal content provides value beyond the Web site,’ Mohan said.

“The exact impact is hard to come by, but Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz said at a media industry conference in October that Dow Jones reaps more than half a billion dollars in subscription revenue across the company’s offerings.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.