Pivotal year coming up for Dow Jones in 2014

Joe Pompeo of Capital New York writes Friday that 2014 is shaping up as a critical year for the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Marketwatch.com.

Pompeo writes, “The 131-year-old financial information and media company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, Barron’s and MarketWatch, has a number of key initiatives on the docket that will test its might during parent-corporation News Corp’s first full fiscal year as a standalone publishing conglomerate.

“Perhaps the most closely-watched of these is the implementation of DJX, a news and data offering meant to increase Dow Jones’ share of the lucrative trading-terminal market that’s dominated by Bloomberg L.P. and, to a lesser extent, Thomson Reuters.

“One knowledgeable source described the rollout of DJX, which has so far been the most high-profile project of C.E.O. Lex Fenwick’s nearly two-year tenure, as a ‘make or break transformation’ for Dow Jones. The product was soft-launched earlier this year and has gotten off to a rocky start, according to a recent report on the website Quartz, which described a ‘lukewarm response’ from top Wall Street firms.

“DJX will be expected to deliver during the next 12 months. But another insider speculated that its parent company, which is currently in the second quarter of News Corp’s 2014 fiscal year, will give it a longer runway.”

Read more here.