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.

“You’re interested in oil import prices, you’re interested in currencies,” Thomson said. “To be honest, it would be hard to find you as a client on the professional end.” With WSJ’s professional edition, he said, that employee could customize a feed that would send an alert when something happens in China that affects oil prices.

On another level, the Journal is trying to capture readers for whom paper is not enough, while financial professional-grade data feeds offer too much at too high a price, and don’t look all that pleasing to the eye. The information that readers get would be more sophisticated, but presented in an easy-to-view way, just like the Journal or the Times or most other news outlets present it to readers on their Web pages now.

It sounds like a promising introduction and an effective way to give readers a more comprehensive look at Dow Jones’s information offerings than they might have gotten before. But how will it play? Company officials won’t share projections.

It might be that Dow Jones, now part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, already has a bunch of happy customers who don’t need to be made happier. It’s hard to say how many untapped readers there might be for this new service, either through business licenses or through individual subscriptions. If nothing else, it’s an experiment done at a time when news outlets need to experiment even more than they are.

(Photo: Reuters)

Earlier this week I brought you the brewing circulation tussle between USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, and which paper will be able to claim to be the largest one in terms of circulation. You can read that here, but for the recap, here are the main points:

• Editor & Publisher reports: USA Today was set to report that circulation fell “17% to 1.88 million for the six months ending September 2009, a drop of about 390,000 copies. The decline could also threaten USA Today’s position as the No. 1 newspaper in the country by circulation.”
• The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press report that the Journal would be the largest paper by circulation, according to the Journal.
• USA Today responds, “We are confident that even with this latest economic impact, USA TODAY will remain the nation’s number one newspaper in total print circulation when the ABC statements are released October 26th.”

As I wrote at the time, it seems that the Journal is counting print and online subscriptions together, and why not? Both are made up of paying subscribers. USA Today, of course, is counting printed newspapers.

We won’t know until their circulation numbers are published on October 26 what the final, comparable figures would be. But today, the Journal revealed its latest numbers:

Circulation was 2,024,269 as of the six-month period ending in September 2009, compared with 2,011,999 in the same period a year ago. Individually paid circulation, a number that advertisers like to watch, grew to 1,437,853. That’s impressive, having any growth at all.

As to how it stacks up to USA Today, and who will be able to claim to be the No. 1 newspaper publisher by circulation, we’re going to have to wait until the 26th.

(Photo: Reuters)

USA Today and The Wall Street Journal aren’t waiting for Oct. 26, the day North American newspapers report their latest circulation numbers, to begin tussling over which one has the biggest paper.

Editor & Publisher made the first move on Friday when Jennifer Saba reported that USA Today was set to report that circulation fell “17% to 1.88 million for the six months ending September 2009, a drop of about 390,000 copies. The decline could also threaten USA Today’s position as the No. 1 newspaper in the country by circulation.” The news came in a memo from USA Today Publisher, David Hunke, to his workers.

Spicy stuff, considering that when we write about its owner, Gannett, we say it is the largest U.S. newspaper publisher that publishes USA Today, the largest newspaper by circulation.

The Wall Street Journal’s Shira Ovide wrote up the news too, adding this: “After USA Today’s memo, the Journal said it is now the largest U.S. newspaper by weekday circulation.” Andrew Vanacore at The Associated Press, featured the Jornal echoing that statement: “Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, declined to give out the newspaper’s circulation figures for the period, but spokesman Robert Christie said, ‘The Journal is now the largest newspaper by circulation.’”

We wrote up the story too, going along the same lines. The next day, however, we got this statement from USA Today’s communications vp Ed Cassidy – a bit too late to run it as an update to our old story. Still, it piqued my interest in a big way because it doesn’t go along with the lines of what we reported earlier:

We are confident that even with this latest economic impact, USA TODAY will remain the nation’s number one newpsaper in total print circulation when the ABC statements are released October 26th.

So how do we figure this? It’s hard to conclude when the numbers haven’t come out yet. I suspect that both papers can make the claim to be No. 1 because the Journal is counting copies to subscribers who get only the online edition as adding to the total number of print subscribers. Newspaper publishers argue over whether those copies “count,” but it seems like they should considering that people pay for Web access in the same way that they do for print.

Or am I wrong? Should circulation — a key measure for businesses of whether and how much to spend on advertising in newspapers — not count online subscriptions? I’m all ears.

(Reuters photo: The Wall Street Journal)

If you read often enough about the supposed death of the newspaper business, you would think that the nation’s newsrooms are increasingly depopulated, barren places, with darkened offices and empty cubicles… the occasional tumbleweed blowing past. (Actually,  large stretches of Tribune Co’s New York bureau look just like that, as I saw earlier this year).

In San Francisco, Chicago and other metropolitan centers, you would be wrong. It’s true that both cities bear unfortunate marks of how rough the advertising decline, rise of the Internet and financial crisis have treated their news operations: Hearst was toying with shutting down the San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago’s leading daily papers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, are owned by bankrupt companies. Improbably enough, both are turning into hot spots for local news competition.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are fighting over San Francisco, and a private equity guy has teamed up with KQED and UC Berkeley to try a nonprofit local news experiment. And now, the Times reported on Wednesday, it is targeting some other cities, including Chicago. Here is an excerpt from reporter Richard Perez-Pena’s writeup on the Times’s decoder blog:

Plans for the San Francisco edition call for adding to the paper, twice a week, two additional pages of news about northern California. At first, the added content will be produced by The Times’ own writers and editors. But eventually, the plan, as in Chicago, is to turn the production over to a local partner.

Here’s more from spokeswoman Diane McNulty, whose statement also was in the Times’s blog:

We’re in conversations with potential news providers in Chicago about adding local content to The Times. Our intent is to roll out these expanded reports in several key markets around the country with Chicago following San Francisco. The details are still being discussed. The idea is to provide additional quality local content for our readers.

Papers like the Times and Journal are trying lots of things that they hope will stem their own ad declines and keep them profitable as they face the threat of a severely diminished future. The idea is to capitalize on the problems that local papers are having by scooping up their readers and giving them a comprehensive national report along with local news. But it’s hard to see where the cost savings will come from in this Chicago case unless they find a local partner to print their papers.

Revenue-wise, perhaps any circulation bump is a good one when it comes to getting more advertising. In terms of fixing what else is wrong with the newspaper business these days, however, it doesn’t look like a game changer. The reason that so many people tout local news as a more healthy media pursuit than national is because local publishers know local audiences and advertisers the best and presumably can give them something that few others can give them. To do that, it’s good to remember that it’s LOCAL publishers who tend to enjoy that advantage.

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.

So here is one way that you can help even if you can’t make the reception: Subscribe to your local paper or subscribe to some magazines. It doesn’t come with cocktails and canapes, but it’s pretty effective if enough people do it.

(Photo: Reuters)

The Wall Street Journal has been making plenty of hay about its rising circulation and the growing number of people online who are using the site, but parent company News Corp is cutting costs as the whole media business suffers from the recession. To that end, here is Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton’s Monday memo on some benefits cutbacks that the company is instituting.

Dear colleagues:

Many companies are resetting their benefits in reaction to the economic challenges of the moment. Dow Jones has felt these same challenges and our business is far from immune to them. Unlike other media companies we have been able to avoid making changes driven by short-term necessity.

What we have done over the past year-and-a-half is to undertake a deep review of our entire benefits program. That review is complete, and today we are announcing a major change in our retirement programs. We are modernizing our approach to retirement savings and aligning our program with the market, News Corp. and our view of the future for Dow Jones.

Key changes include:

The Money Purchase Plan will be frozen as of July 3, 2009. The 401(k) Savings Plan will be enhanced. The net effect will be a lower rate of company contributions.

The retiree healthcare subsidy will be curtailed for most employees effective Jan. 1, 2010. Current retirees or those employees who on Jan. 1, 2010, will be age 50 with at least 5 years of service or have 20 years of service regardless of age will continue to be eligible for a subsidy in a revised retiree healthcare plan.

More details about the benefit program changes can be found here.

The new retirement plans will apply to all non-IAPE* staff in the U.S. We intend to seek the same programs when we enter collective-bargaining negotiations with IAPE this year.

This change allows us to continue to provide a valuable benefit while managing expenses prudently. At the same time, we intend to reinvest some of the savings we achieve in new health and wellness benefits to be introduced this year. We want to give Dow Jones employees - whose ages, family situations, and career profiles are more varied than ever before - increased choice and enhanced coverage while providing individuals with better ways to manage healthcare costs. You will receive more information about the new health and wellness benefits later in 2009.

These changes strengthen this company. Comprehensive, competitive and up-to-date, our benefits programs now position us well for the future. That is our focus.

Best,

Les

* IAPE is the union that represents some Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones staff. The union has to agree to the changes to make them stick for its members. This is similar to when The New York Times Co cut pay by up to 5 percent for many of its workers. The union that represents New York Times rank-and-file workers, for example, had to approve the proposal, whereas the company could simply impose the pay cut for non-unionized workers.

(Photo: Reuters)

Now you know that the uncertain future about the survival of newspapers is news: The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page features an editorial castigating Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry and others for supporting the notion of federal government aid or bailouts for the struggling business.

The Journal gives us a recap of some ideas that have been seeping their way into the public consciousness in recent months, including:

• Maryland Democratic Sen. Benjamin Cardin’s bill to allow newspapers to exist as non-profits.
• Sen. Kerry’s endorsement of a proposal by Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus’s and Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe’s to let newspapers offset their net operating losses over five years instead of two.
• Sen. Kerry’s endorsement of some flexibility under the anti-trust laws, presumably in a way that would allow U.S. newspaper publishers to dream up some ways to force people to pay for the news they read online in a model similar to how the cable TV providers work with the people who provide the shows.
• We note that the editorial didn’t even cover Washington State’s tax break for newspapers, not to mention Connecticut legislators’ recent willingness to help rustle up buyers for some former Journal Register papers. But you might as well add them to the list of ideas.

The Journal’s answer? No! No! No! On what grounds?

The “creative destruction” theory, spurred by people getting their news online, something that governments should let happen as a natural outcome of the free market. Here’s what the WSJ says:

The larger story here is that newspapers are enduring the familiar process of economic “creative destruction,” in this case brought on by the Internet. Advertisers are fleeing to search engines, while barriers to entry in publishing have crashed. Despite the pain this causes to certain companies, this is not much different than any other industry buffeted by new technology or business strategies. The shipping industry changed radically with the advent of containerization. Wal-Mart’s state-of-the-art inventory management transformed retailing. Apple’s iTunes has revolutionized the music industry.

Some new business model will emerge for journalism, if not for all newspapers, and in the meantime the business of reporting the news isn’t vanishing. It is taking new forms and adapting, with newspapers growing their audiences online even as the sources of their revenue shift. The industry is currently debating how to charge customers for content, and no doubt many experiments will be tried. No matter who emerges victorious, the journalism business will be stronger and more credible if it avoids the government’s embrace.

It also touched on the idea that it might be hard for newspapers to expose skullduggery and wrongdoing by the very politicians to whom they owe their lives:

“If we take seriously this notion that the press is the fourth estate, or the fourth branch of government,” Mr. Kerry said in a prepared statement, it’s time we consider its importance to democracy. Talk about a Freudian slip. Newspapers becoming the “fourth branch of government” is exactly what people most fear from any hand extended to save an independent press.

Now, that’s all well and good in the United States. Meanwhile, the Journal is getting a nice boost in India, thanks to government intervention. Here’s a line from the press release that went out on the same day as the editorial against bailing out newspapers:

The Wall Street Journal Asia will be printed Mondays through Fridays by The Express Group at print sites in New Delhi and Mumbai. The paper will be delivered the same day to individual and corporate subscribers and will be available at newsstands in major Indian cities.

The launch of the locally printed edition follows the Indian government’s decision earlier this year to allow foreign investment in the publication of facsimile editions of foreign newspapers and its approval of Dow Jones & Company’s proposal to publish a facsimile edition of The Wall Street Journal Asia in India.

See? Sometimes government aid is a good thing.

Keep an eye on

• Speaking of newspapers, New York Times media columnist David Carr goes head-to-head with the Henry Blodgets of this world who ran the numbers and think the Gray Lady is dressed for bankruptcy or death. Guess again, Carr says. (The New York Times)
• And speaking of The New York Times, it’s waded into the debate over whether billionaire Hollywood and music mogul David Geffen (thank you for “Court and Spark,” Neil Young’s weird phase, Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Guns n’ Roses) is going to be a nice guy or a mean guy if he tries to buy the Times Co. (The New York Times)
• Newsweek decides that the future of publishing is about catering to smart people. (The Washington Post — Newsweek’s sister company)

Where will the mogul strike next? Doesn’t seem like he’s yearning right now for The New York Times, which is doing battle with a guild that doesn’t want to give up lifetime job guarantees of 190-odd Boston Globe staffers.

Instead, New York Post’s Peter Lauria reports, Rupert Murdoch has set his sights on building a Kindle-like device that will deliver content from News Corp publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and the NY Post. The device would also offer content from TV shows and movies that come from the News Corp stable. Murdoch sees it as a way of charging for content on the Web, rather than giving it away free as much of the publishing industry has (which, needless to say, is a big source of current troubles).

The global team assembled for this purpose consists of Murdoch himself, son James, Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton and News Corp’s new chief of digital operations, Jonathan Miller, the paper says.

Maybe Murdoch will show the struggling newspaper industry the way out of the morass. Keep an eye on:

• Someone’s going to buy Twitter one of these days. Kara Swisher lays it out. (All Things Digital)
• After two days of rumors, the big-screen Kindle is coming today. (Silicon Alley Insider)
• Journalism confabs and banquets are being canceled due to the recession. (Forbes)

Photo: Reuters

Three of the traditional media world’s brightest stars have a bright idea: Start a consultancy to help old-media companies charge for their content online. (And announce the venture in an old-media publication.)

From The Wall Street Journal’s website on Tuesday afternoon:

A trio of media executives is starting a firm to guide efforts by newspapers and other publishers to charge for content posted on their Web sites as advertising revenue tumbles.

The venture, Journalism Online LLC, is being led by Steven Brill, the founder of the American Lawyer magazine and Court TV; Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal; and cable-television veteran Leo Hindery.

Crovitz, who was unseated when Rupert Murdoch bought his paper and given a column instead, told the Journal that charging for online content won’t solve all the problems facing newspapers and other information purveyors on the Internet, but it would do some good. He also said that Journalism Online LLC would make money by sharing revenue from consumer payments and licensing fees. No word from Hindery (now in private equity after selling TCI to AT&T and running Global Crossing before that company hit the skids) or Brill (one existing magazine, one defunct one).

UPDATE: Crovitz told us that publishers — not all of them newspaper publishers — are in talks about whether to use the system. He wouldn’t name any, however. (And another UPDATE! Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News Chief Brian Tierney says his papers aren’t ready to sign up yet, but they are interested in talking more about it.)

How does it work? Crovitz said some publishers could charge annual or monthly subscriptions, and possibly per-article payments. The system also could allow a comprehensive monthly fee for access to all publishers who use the system. The New York Times quoted Brill as saying $15 a month is a possible price, but Crovitz said that it’s too early to say yet.

The New York Times and other papers are trying to figure out ways to make people pay for the news they get online after several failed experiments. Mostly, they spent the last decade and more doing exactly the opposite. Now, thanks to the Internet eating their lunch, newspapers and other old-school information providers are facing a loss of advertising revenue, paying subscribers to their print editions and, well, their entire lives. At this time of financial distress, their thoughts naturally turn to how to make more money.

Here are some other details on the project from the NYT’s own article:

• The company has a board of advisors that includes two of the nation’s most prominent lawyers, David Boies and Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general of the United States.
• The company also plans to negotiate licensing and royalty fees with search engines and news aggregators for the use of the publications’ work, and has retained Mr. Boies’ law firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, for that work.

(Photo: Reuters)

Guess where the paparazzi are training their lenses these days? For those of you who missed it, The New York Times writes that gossip rags have all but abandoned Britney Spears for the thrill of capturing corporate excesses on camera. From the paper:

The tabloid media, of course, have always peered into the excesses of the rich and famous with a mix of puritan disapproval and voyeurism. But these outlets and other news organizations are now recording troubling uses of taxpayer money at country clubs, private airports and glamorous retreats and, in so doing, explicitly tapping into a fierce populist anger at corporate America, and even pressuring Congress to hold companies accountable.

Populist indignation apart, perhaps people also feel a sense of glee when watching or reading about the severe scaling back of corporate budgets that once supported lavish lifestyles. Gawker may have captured the glee best in this biting account of The Wall Street Journal story on Goldman Sachs executives being asked to stay at Embassy Suites rather than the Ritz.

Reporters are often sent to capture nuggets of corporate excess, the more outrageous the better. An affinity for $40 crab legs? Flying to DC in private jets to ask for bailout money? Poolside sales conferences with six-figure tabs? The media loves writing about this stuff almost as much as people enjoy reading it. So if you’ve got any tips, let us know.

Keep an eye on:

• New AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sees a lot of options for AOL’s future. (All Things Digital)
• Alibaba seeks partnerships with U.S. companies. (Reuters)
• Carl Icahn says he doesn’t intend to push for a sale of Lions Gate. (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)