MediaFile

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.