Wall Street Journal

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 11:40pm on Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Dow Jones will launch a 'professional edition' of the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper reported on October 21, 2009:

"Dow Jones & Co. on Wednesday announced an online venture that combines The Wall Street Journal's Web site with Dow Jones's business-to-business news service and databases.

The targeted users are businesses and individuals who need more specialized information about energy or corporate bonds, for example, than is available from WSJ.com, but aren't the large companies targeted for costlier services by Dow Jones Newswires or Bloomberg L.P.

The service, called The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition and costing up to $49 a month, has been under discussion for much of the year. Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp., publishes the Journal and owns Dow Jones Newswires and the Factiva news database. The new service is one of the company's first efforts to blend these products, which have largely been aimed at different audiences.

The product is part of a flurry of efforts by news organizations to earn more revenue from their online offerings amid the wide availability of free news on the Internet. Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN.com and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper are among the many other enterprises that have sought to offer niche or in-depth information and charge for it.

WSJ Professional allows users to set up the Web site with custom feeds of news, information and alerts for the markets and industry sectors they care most about, as well as to access the regular content on WSJ.com. Dow Jones editors will select news stories and information to help WSJ Professional users dig deeper into topics of interest.

Although Dow Jones plans to charge consumers $49 a month each for WSJ Professional, businesses that buy subscriptions for multiple users will pay less, said Executive Vice President Clare Hart. By contrast, the base price for a subscription to WSJ.com is $149 a year, or a little more than $12 a month, according to Dow Jones's reports with the Audit Bureau of Circulations, though prices vary widely."

The full story:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704597704574486791227424728.html

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 1:58pm on Monday, June 15th, 2009

U.S. advertising spending fell 14% in the first quarter of 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 11, 2009:

"U.S. ad spending on media such as TV, print and online display ads fell 14% to $30.18 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to TNS Media Intelligence, despite guardedly optimistic talk in recent weeks about a bottoming out in the market.

The numbers, which exclude categories such as online-search ads and in-store ads, suggest that the ad downturn is far more pronounced than many expected. "We are now in the record books with the worst quarter in a decade," said Jon Swallen, TNS's senior vice president of research.

TNS, an ad-tracking firm owned by WPP PLC, said a recovery in the media business may take time. "So far it looks like second-quarter spending is starting pretty much the same way the first quarter ended. There are hopeful signs of general economic indicators bottoming out, but the advertising sector still appears to be lagging behind," Mr. Swallen said.

The Internet was the only medium to see growth. Online display advertising, which includes banners, was up 8.2%, TNS said. Other researchers have signaled that digital advertising has been less insulated from the recession. Last week, PricewaterhouseCoopers said U.S. online-ad spending fell 5% in the first quarter to $5.5 billion."

The full story:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124467774162404243.html

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:00pm on Monday, May 11th, 2009

News Corporation is planning to use "micro payments" at the Wall Street Journal web site, Reuters reported on May 10, 2009:

"News Corp is planning to introduce "micro payments" for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal's website, WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson said on Sunday.

"It's a payments system -- once we have your details we will be able to charge you according to what you read, in particular, a high price for specialist material," Thomson said in an e-mailed response to Reuters questions."

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 12:05pm on Monday, April 27th, 2009

So how is the Wall Street Journal doing with Rupert Murdoch in charge? Scott Sherman offers his assessment in the article "Has the 'Journal' Lost Its Soul?" published in The Nation on April 22, 2009 (May 11, 2009 print edition):

"...a great many soothsayers had predicted that Murdoch's ownership would have regrettable, if not catastrophic, consequences for the newspaper. Murdoch stoked those fears: he joked with Time in June 2007, six months before he concluded his $5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones & Company, owner of the Journal, that he would put tabloid-style photos of half-naked women in its hallowed pages--provided those women had MBA degrees.

But the wrecking ball has not come to the Journal; sleaze has not invaded its pages; the most dire fears have not been realized. Murdoch has not extinguished quality writing at the paper; he has not transformed the China coverage to benefit his business interests in China; he has not terminated the paper's superb coverage of art, photography, music, dance and theater; he has not murdered the "A-hed," the quirky feature that has adorned Page 1 since 1941; and so on. Says Byron Calame, a deputy assistant managing editor of the Journal who went on to become public editor of the New York Times from 2005 to 2007: "I'm not aware of any corruption of the news standards."

But the Journal has changed in very significant ways. Quite a few Journal watchers--including many people who left the paper but continue to care deeply about it--are reading it with disquiet and unease. They see a newspaper whose coverage of the financial crisis, while impressive in many respects, lacks analytical rigor; a newspaper that is running shorter articles; a newspaper whose copy-editing standards have declined; and a newspaper that is abandoning a rich tradition of long-form narrative journalism."

The full story:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090511/sherman