The Wall Street Journal — now for ‘professionals’
The Wall Street Journal, ever on the hunt for new ways to please its readers and new ways to make money (and what, we ask, is wrong with that?), will launch a new, pricier version this November. Called “The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition,” it is designed for business readers who want more than what the daily newspaper and website provide on their own.
Essentially, it is the Journal’s daily offering, with reports from Dow Jones Newswires and a reservoir of news and information from Factiva, the news archive that Dow Jones owns — and a bunch more stuff:
- Information from more than 17,000 global sources, some of which are not available to the public.
- A one-year archive of Factiva’s global business sources and a two-year archive of wsj.com content.
- More than 30 industry pages, managed by Dow Jones editors
- Six industry sections managed by Journal editors who select news and information for readers on pharmaceuticals, healthcare, energy, media and marketing, telecommunications and technology.
- Personalized homepages and news alerts for when things break.
Dow Jones plans to sell the edition to businesses, which would make it available to employees through “site licenses” (ie, your business buys a license that makes the professional edition available to X number of people for a price to be determined). In January, it will be available to people for $49 a month, or just under $600 a year, said Clare Hart, head of Dow Jones’s Enterprise Media Group, which oversees Dow Jones Newswires, Factiva and Dow Jones Indexes.
So why have a professional edition for a paper that is arguably already for professionals? According to Hart, it is an attempt to recognize the middle ground between “regular” readers (like my mom) and financial clients who use the super-charged “terminals” from Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg that provide news along with sophisticated and deep financial information.
“It’s a response to what customers are driving us toward. Customers want the simplicity of a consumer application with the sophistication of an enterprise application,” Hart said.
Robert Thomson, who edits the Journal and oversees Dow Jones’s editorial operations, offered a hypothetical example of an oil service company employee in Boise who might not be in the market for a Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters computer, but needs more information than he or she would get in the paper.
Help a starving business reporter
They moved your markets. Now you can move their bank accounts.
The Society of American Business Editors and Writers, or SABEW, is hosting an event next week at Columbia University’s School of Journalism to help business journalists who have lost their jobs or found themselves in other tough straits because of the biggest story on every business reporter’s beat — the financial crisis. Here is the text of the invitation:
Former Wall Street Journal Managing Editor and ProPublica founder Paul Steiger, and New York Times Business Editor Larry Ingrassia invite you to join them at an event to benefit business journalism and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW).
SABEW needs your support to help displaced business journalists and train business journalists for the digital age and new media landscape. Among SABEW’s programs are a revamped job listing site, a market for freelancers to find work, a mentor program for displaced journalists, teletraining on multimedia and business journalism topics, scholarships to attend conferences and training, and a revamp of our website to provide more robust services to members.
The event is free but donations to the SABEW Fund for the Future are requested as SABEW must raise $50,000 by August to qualify for a matching amount from four foundations.
Many of the business reporters who have recently lost their jobs worked at newspapers and magazines that have been shedding employees right and left because advertising revenue is plunging. Some of that is because of the recession, but much of it is because advertisers see fewer people reading those publications and are moving their ad dollars elsewhere.
Newpapers are obsolete, I surprised they lasted this long. you should pick a theme and commit to it, make yourself a media periodical
discuss music, movies, gaming etc. you will then become more viable with a larger consumer base
condense the nonsensical local stories, no on really cares about the flock of geese that nested on the highway or whatnot. no once cares about beatrice turning 150 years old. (hell beatrice doesnt even know she is 150)
if your content is more appealing, more people will purchase it, and you will get more money for ads, due to a higher consumer base simple math
but as for the news, its been done, daily at 5 and 10 repeated at 1
and can be found 24 hours a day on certain channels and online
your days are numbered paperboy! evolve or get out the way!
CNBC=Cranky Nasty Business Correspondent
Rick Santelli’s extended tryout process to join the more vitriolic commentary-mongers at Fox News continues. Santelli already raised eyebrows and network blood pressure at CNBC when he aired his “tea party” comments on live TV, raising questions among media obsessives about whether he was in the tank for the Republican Party.
Today’s incident was tamer in the sense that he only accused one of his colleagues, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman, of asking stupid questions. That’s not as big an insult to a civilian as it is to a journalist, who hopes to get paid for asking smart questions. (And someone with Liesman’s extensive business journalism pedigree probably asks fewer stupid questions than most.)
The background: Six of the CNBC gang were on TV discussing whether Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and ex-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pressured Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis to keep quiet about losses at Merrill Lynch when Bank of America was also under pressure from the government to buy Merrill. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said last month that Bernanke and Paulson threatened Lewis with losing his job if he didn’t push the acquisition through to, essentially, save the U.S. and world financial systems.
One CNBC reporter, Dennis Kneale, wondered aloud if it would be illegal for, say, a lawyer to recommend to Lewis that he violate “Reg FD” disclosure laws that would more or less deceive Bank of America’s shareholders into accepting the deal, knowing that if they were aware of Merrill’s troubled condition, they would oppose it with their very lives.
Then this happened (Beware: Everyone was speaking over everyone else, so we might have missed a word or two here and there):
Liesman: Ask the question in a more compelling way: ‘I want you to save the world and not disclose.’
Santelli: Come on, Steve! Are we going to come up with excuses to break the rules? To break the law? You sound like Richard Nixon! Who did you vote for, Steve?
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, but when Rick comes on in the morning from the pits, I hush everybody. He speaks real wisdom and in a very entertaining fashion. Maybe he should tone it down for reasons of self-preservation, but his “emperor-has-no-clothes” attitude is totally on-point. One of the real gems on business b’casting. I hope CNBC realizes that.
Did the watchdog forget to bark?
The opening panel at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual meet in Denver addressed an interesting question: Did 9,000 business journalists blow it when it came to ringing the alarm bells on the financial meltdown?
The five SABEW panelists — The New York Times’ business editor Larry Ingrassia, Columbia Journalism Review critic and former Wall Street Journal reporter Dean Starkman, personal finance columnist Jane Bryant Quinn, Emmy-winning former ABC News investigative reporter Allan Dodds Frank and Greg Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan — agreed that the financial press could have done more. Newspapers, wire services, magazines and television stations could have been more aggressive, and they could have taken more pains to explain why complex things like mortgage-backed securities might matter to the average reader.
But journalists can hardly be accused of “blowing it” when even doomsday pundits like Bob Shiller and Nouriel Roubini could predict only parts of the nightmare scenario that is unfolding in the U.S. economy right now, the panelists said.
CJR’s Starkman, who’s just completed a “deep dive” into the news coverage leading up to the financial crisis, said his report, which will be up for public consumption next month, found that the top journalism outlets didn’t do a good enough job of signalling that the tiny sparks in the housing and securities markets could flame up into a giant financial blaze.
“If the question is, did the business press provide adequate warnings to the public about the crisis, the answer is negative,” Starkman said. His 6,400-word report, which surveyed scores of articles in publications like the NYT, WSJ, Forbes, Fortune and others between January 2000 and June 2007, concludes that the investigative reporting started out strong but then downshifted to “good, but not sufficient,” as reporters wrote about the housing bubble and defective mortgage products, but failed to focus on the lenders.
The Times’ Ingrassia took issue with Starkman’s as-yet-unreleased report, rattling off a long list of stories his paper had done in the early years about ”predatory home equity loans (that) were being diced into mortgage-backed securities,” out-of-control mortgage markets and even excess executive pay. “I think the record shows that the press was there in laying the groundwork and ringing the alarm bell.” But, Ingrassia added, there was little more reporters could do if regulators didn’t heed the news and readers didn’t “seem receptive” to it.
Would politicians have done something to avert the crisis if people had cared more and pressed their legislators for better regulation? Which begs a further question — did reporters fail to write stories in a way that would make people sit up and take notice?
This article re-builds some of my trust in the media, obviously media is wading through an ocean of politics within and in their information sources. Post event analysis is something I never expected from a group that demonstrates “GLITZ N GLAMOUR” as their esoteric mantra.It’s also obvious they frequently go “out of their way” to help keep the new investors in the dark about how the pro traders harvest (predation) the funds of the new traders.Many of the dark spots on the media dalmation became glaringly obvious with their relationship with “W”.Public trust may never get back to where it use to be in the 40-50s due to the greed that exists in all of us.
Washington Post takes care of Business
The press release says that The Washington Post is expanding its “A” section. This is true. It also is eliminating its business section on a standalone basis, except for a more enhanced version that will run on Sundays. Our story has just hit the wire. Read the memo here:
Beginning March 30, we will make several changes in The Post’s presentation of business news and some Style-section features.
Our business coverage will shift into the main news package in the A Section Monday through Saturday. We will have a new business and economics display page inside the section, designed to signal to readers the centrality of economic news, as well as the increasing overlap of political and economic events, in today’s world. The expanded A Section will allow us to make better decisions about story play and length, and to run a leaner, better-organized newspaper.
The A Section will take readers through National and International news, then into the new Economic & Business section, a Washington Business page, the Fed Page, and the Editorial and Op-Ed pages.
The shift of business coverage into A will result in other changes. Rather than run a single section once a week on Washington Business, as we now do each Monday, we will have a daily page dedicated to local business issues. On Monday, our business page will look ahead to the week’s news.
The Post no longer will run full listings of daily stock-price movements Tuesday through Saturday. Instead, we will add a new daily half-page package of statistics and graphics that will show how major national and local stocks fared, how world markets and commodities performed, and what is happening to key interest rates. Readers who want to find comprehensive stock prices will be directed to washingtonpost.com.
We will enhance our Sunday Business section, by including not only full stock-price data from the week, but new tables listing the schedule for major and local earnings releases, U.S. market performances over the past quarter, maps that depict the performance of global markets, a graphic of S&P 500 sectors performance changes, foreign-currency exchange rates and interest rates. Also on Sunday, The Post will include more personal-finance stories aimed at helping individuals and small businesses survive the economic downturn.
content is king… always has been … always will be…. #johngaltwashere