Categories: OLD Media Moves

Marketwatch: Always a destination for breaking financial news

Douglas MacIntyre writes on the 24/7 Wall St. site about what he remembers about Marketwatch when it launched 10 years ago. At the time, MacIntyre was the CEO of financial news and data company FutureSource.

MacIntyre wrote, “One impression of MarketWatch should be unchanged after all of these years. The website was always the best destination for breaking financial news. There were really no exceptions to that. During the dial-up era of 1997, the interfaces and graphics at the site were not as fancy. But, there was no other place to turn on the internet to get information as the daily financial news raced by.

“TheStreet was more of a commentary site, even then, although it had started out reporting more news. The financial sections of the portals like Yahoo! were geared toward personal investing and pulling together news from the AP and Reuters. The Motley Fool had almost no news. The founding brothers there cared about giving the personal investor good solid advice about making money in the markets.

“All of this is to say that MarketWatch is today what it was when it started. I used to visit the site several times a day back then, and I do today as well. Financial news has a short shelf life, sometimes just a few minutes. MarketWatch has made those minutes count. It readers never had to sit and wonder what was going on. The journalists at MarketWatch got it to the front page of the site within minutes.”

Read more here.

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.