Dow Jones Streamlines Its News Roles
Important Details: Dow Jones told its staff Thursday that all the talk of doing things differently in the digital age would make real change in their work lives. A memo to staff, published on Jim Romanesko’s Poynter, says Dow Jones is moving forward with streamlining news roles within the company:
- The Dow Jones Newswires will act as a central point of covering breaking news. That includes "major announcement-driven and breaking U.S. corporate news." Importantly, its coverage will be used throughout the company, for WSJ Online and for the print paper itself, as well as for Newswires customers.
- The Online Journal staff will focus on making best use of interactivity, of what the Web does best: blogs, infographics, video, podcasts – all of these extensions and interpretations of the news itself.
- The print Journal staff will focus on greater explanatory and analytic journalism, longer-form work. Importantly, this longer-form work, or, even shorter-form interpretation, will get published online as it is ready, and not held for the next issue.
The announced changes fell clearly in the conceptual re-thinking of the overall Dow Jones business. Gordon Crovitz, who took over responsibility for the company’s consumer businesses – print and online – earlier this year, has made that clear. At an SIIA session in New York in late November, Crovitz proudly proclaimed himself bullish on the future.
"I may be the last person in America who has publisher (Wall Street Journal) in his title, who is an optimist." Crovitz said his company sees this as one of those few times that will revolutionize the company. "When you get through the Wall Street Journal (daily), you are well-equipped. But by the time you do, the world has changed," he said. Consequently, Wall Street Journal Online is increasingly about "what’s happening right now."
He said this is the second revolution in Dow Jones’ history: After its 1889 founding, the Wall Street Journal saw its first revolution in the 1940s as it broadened from a narrow-interest financial markets/data paper to one that more broadly covered business. Now he says, "Journal 3.0" has new choices, as the company looks to a time when its revenues will be mostly digital rather than the current "60 percent print/40 percent other" mix.
Journal 3.0 would embrace these realities:
- On paper, more portable; smaller page width; more legible typeface (given aging of print readers); scannable (some days readers spend 10 minutes, other days one-and-a-half hours); more summary boxes; more forward-leaning coverage.
- Online, it is about the business news of the moment, and that is clearly reflected in the announced staffing changes. In addition, it’s about getting beyond what Crovitz called "primitive" message boards, so that WSJ customers can more fully discuss and debate the news that moves them. On getting to customers, "we need to focus on the (differing) channels of distribution." Finally, he noted that the company hopes to leverage the learning of its enterprise businesses, including now wholly owned Factiva, by "figuring out how to get the other parts of the business into the workflow."
He said competitors are "too numerous to count": "It used to be Business Week, Fortune, and the New York Times. Now (in addition) there are dozens of new companies out there. "There’s a wonderful little company called TechTarget, for instance, that niches into 26 segments."
Acknowledging what you don’t know is basic to our chaotic era, he said. "We really need to understand how people consume business and financial information."
In Outsell’s Opinion: Talking about change is the easier task; making staff change the way they work is much harder. Outsell believes this rightsizing of the Journal staff is the right thing to do, although the transition will likely be ungainly and the move is already drawing the ire of DJ unions.
For decades, staff time didn’t seem precious. Now with significant cutbacks throughout the news industry, smart allocation of work is essential going forward. It’s about creating value and strengthening the journalistic mission of the press. Those two pressure points are often placed in opposition to each other, but reorgs like this portend a potential for achieving both.
Fundamentally, the changes move on the principle that the publishers must re-learn how their customers are using products, and move around the resources to serve them better than before, adding intelligence and building future businesses at the same time.