WSJ’s Baker: We will expand Market Talk

Wall Street Journal managing editor Gerard Baker sent out the following announcement on Monday:

Now that we have completed the integration of the global news operations of Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal, we can focus our attention and efforts on the best ways to maximize the impact of the combined newsroom.

The first priority – and the first point of publication – for all of our business-focused journalism, is and will remain, the newswire.  Dow Jones Newswires is core to the identity of our company and central to its financial success.  It is the cornerstone of our institutional content, the primary real-time source of high-impact and high-value, business-oriented news.

Our integrated newsroom gives us an unrivaled opportunity to further strengthen Newswires, and we will begin with an important expansion of a key component.

Market Talk, as many of you know, has long been among the most popular features of Dow Jones Newswires and it’s a concept competitors have followed. A vehicle for quick analysis of business, financial and economic news, Market Talk is an essential element of our aim to dominate coverage of breaking news and to serve institutional customers with our expert insights and so I am excited to announce an initiative to significantly boost the scope and volume of Market Talk.

If you cover a financial market, a corporate sector, a country, its economy or politics and policy, you will be expected to contribute regularly and frequently to Market Talk. Following any noteworthy development in your area of coverage, we need you to weigh in as quickly as possible with a snippet of no more than 100 words that helps contextualize and put into perspective what’s happened. Market Talk is also a great way to share analysis and insights gleaned from your reporting and research.

Market Talk should be part of the rhythm of how we report the news, without distracting from the significant progress we have made in increasing scoops and other value-added coverage and enterprise stories.

These insights will be fed into the Market Talk stream that runs on Dow Jones Newswires.  They can also serve as valuable fodder for many of our blogs and will be the intellectual building blocks of articles you produce.

This initiative will be vigorously promoted by the heads of each region and coverage chiefs. Shepherding this coverage will be key markets editors around the world: Ken Howe in Hong Kong, Katie Martin in London and Pat Sullivan in New York.

Steve Wisnefski, head of our global RealTime desk in New York, will oversee the rollout across the news organization, in coordination with Dave Pettit, our Editor of Institutional News.

Please stay tuned in the coming days for information on mandatory training sessions, where you’ll learn more about what deserves a Market Talk. Meanwhile, if you want to start filing, addresses are easily found on Outlook. Examples of what we are seeking – which can be as short as an insightful line or two – will be posted on NewsNet.

Market Talk is a unique service that is at our core as a financial news provider and as an organization that aims to be digital-first for both consumers and professionals.  If every beat reporter contributes three or four a week, it will go a very long way to providing the real-time analysis that is crucial to Dow Jones Newswires.