Tag Archives: Dow Jones & Co.
Online WSJ subscribers: Dow Jones acted unreasonably
by Chris Roush
A group of online subscribers to The Wall Street Journal told the Second Circuit on Wednesday that Dow Jones & Co. did not act reasonably when it stopped providing access to some of its Web content, urging the appeals court to reverse a district court’s summary judgment ruling.
Sean McLernon of Law360.com writes, “A New York federal judge allowed Dow Jones to escape the putative class action suit in March, finding that Dow Jones had acted reasonably and within its rights under the subscriber agreement when it stopped providing access to content from financial publication Barron’s Online. In Thursday’s brief, four named subscriber class action plaintiffs claim that whether the company acted reasonably is a triable issue of fact.
“While Dow Jones contends that discontinuing or changing services are essential to an online publication service because the business demands “constant updates, improvements and innovations,” the subscribers argue that the changes could not be accurately described as an upgrade of its news and informational content.
“‘In fact, WSJ.com was diminished by the removal of Barron’s Online content,’ the brief said. ‘Instead, the purpose of the Barron’s Online spinoff was simply for Dow Jones to make more money from its annual WSJ.com subscribers by launching a separate subscription service. As Dow Jones’ research showed, current WSJ.com subscribers were the best potential market for a separate Barron’s Online subscription product.’
“The plaintiffs, who prepaid for a year’s subscription to the Journal online, which included access to Barron’s Online, said they were injured when Dow Jones removed free access to Barron’s Online in January 2006. At that time, Dow Jones requested an additional $20 per year for access to the newly revamped Barron’s, according to the complaint.”
Read more here. A subscription is required.
Dow Jones Newswires’ Lipschutz stair-stepped his way to the top
by DeanRotbart
It is a bit ironic that unlike his counterparts at rivals Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg News, the managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires never worked as a regular reporter or editor at The Wall Street Journal.
Neal S. Lipschutz, who since January 2007 has overseen all of the editorial operations of the burgeoning Dow Jones & Co, electronic news unit, first joined the company in 1982 as a copyreader and then stair-stepped his way to the top of the masthead, and now also carries the title of senior vice president.
While his byline has appeared periodically in the print edition of the Journal, Lipschutz was never actually on staff there.
The dedicated news staff of Dow Jones Newswires is smaller than that of either Reuters or Bloomberg News. But Lipschutz’s team of reporters and editors still number about 800, spread throughout bureaus in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Plus, many Journal reporters nowadays do double duty filing dispatches for DJN.
While the Journal’s readership is large and diverse, subscribers to DJN’s various news services typically are full-time, professional investors, money managers, traders and other professionals who pay thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars annually for DJN’s specialized brand of financial news and data. DJN is a healthy profit center for Dow Jones.
Although Lipschutz, who turned 56 years old this week, is not as well known publicly as Bloomberg’s Matthew Winkler or Reuters’s Stephen J. Adler, Lipschutz is a major force in American and global financial news and easily one of NewsBios’s 100 Most Influential Business and Financial Journalists for 2012.
Increasingly, under the ownership of News Corp. – which acquired Dow Jones & Co. in December 2007 — all the DJN news brands have more closely coordinated their coverage and integrated their staff with The Journal. Indeed, the lines between the print and electronic editions of the Journal and DJN are more blurred than ever under News Corp.,which has only increased Lipschutz’s influence during the past five years.
With Lipschutz’s guidance, in 2011, the company launched DJ FX Trader, a major news and data product that provides wall-to-wall coverage of the foreign exchange market.
Unlike competitors Winkler, 56, and Adler, 57, Lipschutz has chosen to operate as a kind of player-coach at DJN, appearing frequently in streaming videos on WSJ.com, blogging and writing a news analysis column, “Point of View” that is distributed electronically.
The column was nominated for a 2011 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, although Lipschutz was not selected as a finalist.
Stephen Wisnefski, senior editor for the Americas at DJN, wrote the Loeb nomination letter on his boss’s behalf. In the letter, Wisnefski noted that Lipschutz’s articles “provided clear insight… [were] published multiple times a week… within an hour of significant developments… [were] timely, to-the-point and free of gratuitous opinion.” Lipschutz was commended for taking “an unconventional angle” to whatever he reported on. At one point, according to the nomination letter, Lipschutz “logically built a case that industrialized nations would need to raise the age at which their citizens retire… ahead of a G-20 meeting, when the issue was on the front-burner.” Wisnefski did not mention in his nomination letter that he reports to Lipschutz.
In his columns, Lipschutz has called on the Federal Reserve to hold open and frequent press conferences, which Lipschutz said would “help demystify the Fed and make it more democratic… [and increase] the Fed’s standing with the public.” In an attempt to encourage the Federal Reserve to be more open, Lipschutz wrote, “If you wind up in Rome, do as the Romans do. Find a lectern and state your case. Take on questions and defend your positions. Get your sound bites distributed far and wide.”
Lipschutz has spent a great deal of time writing about the Federal Reserve. In one of his Loeb-nominated columns, Lipschutz wrote about the effectiveness of Federal Reserve’s plan to stimulate the economy by buying Treasury bonds. Lipschutz felt that joblessness in this country “may be due to ‘structural’ factors and would thus be immune from monetary policy.”
Lipschutz regularly attends the World Economic Forum in Davos and participates in various industry and professional conferences around the globe.
Lipschutz, himself, has yet to win any significant individual journalism awards during the course of his career, which began in 1978 at the Paper Trade Journal in New York. At least three times his work has been included in a group of DJN entries that received honors from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
Lipschutz, a native of Brooklyn who owns a home in White Plains, is married to Jessica Lipschutz, 59. Jessica is the daughter of the late Boris Yavitz, a former dean of Columbia University’s Business School (1975-1982). Yavitz, who was born in Russia, raised in Israel, and served in the British Navy during World Ware II, died in 2009 at the age of 85. From 1976 through 1982, he was a director and deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The couple has three children, Eric, Kenny, and Claire.
WSJ/Dow Jones names new Zurich bureau chief
by Chris Roush
Wall Street Journal international editor Matt Murray sent out the following announcement on Wednesday:
We are excited to announce that Andrew Morse will be the new chief of our WSJ/Newswires bureau in Zurich, the latest addition to our dynamic and ever-evolving Europe team.
Andrew is heading to the bureau at a fascinating time for Switzerland. It remains firmly outside the euro zone, and has previously enjoyed buoyant economic growth while the rest of the continent floundered. All good economic things come to an end, however, and the Swiss economy developed holes in the last quarter. It is also wrestling with how to preserve its status as an offshore banking capital while other countries demand details of bank accounts, while its banks are struggling to adapt to tough too-big-to-fail regulation.
Andrew is currently deputy chief of our joint bureau in Los Angeles, where he helps oversee coverage of general and economic news for the West Coast. Before that he was Newswires bureau chief in San Francisco. Fluent in Japanese, he previously was the WSJ’s financial services correspondent in Tokyo and was part of the team that covered the Japanese earthquake and radiation disaster in 2011. Before joining the WSJ in 2004, he worked for, among others, Reuters, Bloomberg and TheStreet.com. A native of Worcester, Mass., he has an undergraduate degree in communications from Boston University and a master’s in international affairs from the University of California, San Diego.
Our current chief, Anita Greil, is leaving Dow Jones after 17 superb years as reporter, bureau chief and then managing editor to join a financial services company in Zurich. She will be sorely missed and goes with our best wishes. We’ll soon provide an update on her other Newswires responsibilities in Turkey, Eastern Europe and Russia.
Lex Fenwick remakes Dow Jones
by Chris Roush
Jennifer Saba of Reuters profiles new Dow Jones & Co. CEO Lex Fenwick, who is changing how the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s operates.
Saba writes, “Fenwick has been called a master salesman and business builder whose hard-charging style often runs roughshod over colleagues and subordinates. His makeover of Dow Jones comes at a crucial time for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as News Corp prepares to split off its global publishing assets from its entertainment businesses.
“Murdoch needs Fenwick’s shock treatment to succeed so that Dow Jones, with about $2 billion in annual revenue, can be the growth engine for the new publishing company, analysts said.
“Most of News Corp’s newspapers are grappling with industry-wide problems of declining readership and print advertising sales, plus the fallout from the hacking scandal at its British publications. One bright spot is Dow Jones’ Wall Street Journal, the top U.S. newspaper by circulation, which also boasts one of publishing’s most successful digital strategies.
“For Dow Jones, Fenwick’s arrival in February has been more of a jolt than when News Corp bought the company in 2007. The executives Murdoch brought in, including seasoned newspaperman Les Hinton as CEO, were seen as evolutionary and, mostly, respectful of colleagues.”
Read more here.
WSJ/Dow Jones to reorganize editorial and focus more on scoops
by Chris Roush
Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson sent out the following message to the staff on Thursday:
We have journeyed far together over the past few years, having become the best-selling newspaper in the US, created a global digital platform with more than 60 million different readers each month, and revived Newswires with DJFX Trader, among many, many other accomplishments. Journal and Newswire journalists now frequently share a common space, architecturally and culturally, and have a far clearer sense of shared purpose in an era in which many news organizations are dazed and confused.
Our journey is far from over and we must now begin a new phase of integration, creating a single newsroom that does away with duplication and puts extra emphasis on scoops, thoughtful analysis and deeper reporting. The aim is to fashion an editorial engine that will drive content for all of our platforms, from the print Journal to a real real-time news service and customized digital feeds for specialist readers. For that strategy to be successful, total integration must be our imperative, not to cut costs (though spending, like imbibing, should always be done in moderation), but to make the most of our peerless journalism.
We will be mobilizing joint journalistic teams around particular subjects with a view to dominating those areas, generating more scoops, moving more markets and providing extra time for textured reporting. A team of senior editors will be reaching out to many of you in coming days to solicit opinions and elicit ideas. We will then distil your wisdom (and discard my preconceptions) and move quickly to form new reporting and editing teams to take advantage of the manifold opportunities that await the world’s classiest journalists and the globe’s pre-eminent news organization.
Dow Jones CEO Fenwick bullish on journalism
by Liz Hester
Lex Fenwick, chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Co., opened the full day of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in New York with comments about the importance of investing in quality journalism and content delivery systems.
Fenwick, who spent more than two decades at Bloomberg LP, took his role atop the parent company of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in February and talked broadly about the digital strategy.
“Absolutely there’s demand for quality journalism and content,” Fenwick said. “We think it (digital) is one of the greatest opportunities afforded to us. We can now get our content to anyone in the world effectively free of delivery charge.”
Lisa Gibbs, senior writer for Money Magazine, interviewed Fenwick and asked about the differences between Dow Jones and Bloomberg. While praising Bloomberg’s corporate culture of making people “feel as if you’re a part of a family,” Fenwick pointed out the two firms were more different than alike despite being in the financial news business. He mentioned Bloomberg was founded as a data and analytics company with news coming later, while Dow had a 150-year history of covering the markets.
He did, however, say he was working to bring some of the customer service aspects of Bloomberg to Dow Jones. In November, the company is planning to launch a help service via online chat. Fenwick is also planning to invest heavily in content and delivering the news in many different languages, reaching a much wider audience.
Other investments he mentioned were a proprietary distribution system to get out Dow Jones Newswires content. Right now, they use Reuters and Bloomberg terminals as well as The Wall Street Journal web site. Fenwick also said Dow was working to build a portfolio monitoring system tied to the content on their sites. People would be able to enter passwords from their brokerage accounts instead of uploading each holding. Dow Jones would then show real-time data as well as news to match the portfolio.
“We can bring this service and content to people in the lanaguage they speak, I think we can drive readership and build a customer base,” Fenwick said.
He mentioned that those with portfolios were more often affluent, something advertisers love.
Wisnefski becomes ME of Dow Jones FX Trader
by Chris Roush
Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson sent out the following staff promotion:
It is with much relish that we announce that Steve “The Wizard” Wisnefski will become DJ FX Trader Managing Editor, in addition to continuing as the senior Newswires editor for North and South America. In our own version of a currency swap, Steve takes the crucial FX mantle from that great galvanizer Gabriella Stern, who is moving to WSJ.com as a Deputy Managing Editor.
Steve will continue to drive the global FX team’s push for scoops and timely analysis on political, economic, corporate and financial themes that influence global currency markets. He will encourage, cajole and rouse reporters around the world to contribute, and his cool and concise commissioning will have my absolute backing. The profound success of our FX wire has created an opportunity for us to effectuate a new form of wire service that is contemporary in character and draws on all the resources of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal.
Jim Pensiero, a Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, will continue to help lead DJ FX Trader. Steve will work closely with Jim and with the key regional FX editors, including Michael J. Casey in New York, Ros Mathieson and Billy Mallard in Singapore and Jenny Paris in London. Steve will continue to report to Neal Lipschutz, managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires.
While Steve will retain his current duties, he will be able to turn significant attention to leading the global FX team because of the excellence of his direct reports: Linda Fung, who oversees real-time equities and resources coverage; Michelle LaRoche, who supervises real-time copy desks; Charlie Roth, Latin America editor; and Cristina Aby-Azar, head of Wall Street Journal Americas.
Steve has vast experience across asset classes and oceans. He has served as Newswires top editor for the Americas since September 2010, has headed Americas commodities and energy coverage, and served as deputy managing editor for U.S. equities coverage. He was the Newswires Chicago bureau chief from 2005 to 2008, and supervised Latin America coverage from 2002 to 2005. He joined Dow Jones in 1997 as a reporter in Sao Paulo, and later became Brazil bureau chief. In 2008, he was a part of a reporting team that won a SABEW Best in Business Award for Breaking News.
Please join me in wishing Steve all the best, and file early and often on anything FX-related,
WSJ/Dow Jones looking for temp reporters in northern Europe
by Chris Roush
John Stoll, the Nordics bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, sent out the following email to the staff on Friday:
Our combined WSJ/DJN Nordic bureau is in the market for hungry reporters looking to spend a few months in Scandinavia compiling a portfolio of unforgettable features and hard fought scoops. This short-term reporting opportunity comes as some key Dow Jones journalists in Stockholm take breaks for parental leave. The region includes Iceland, Greenland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Baltics — making for a landscape of delightful yarns and potential newsbreaks. Companies like H&M, IKEA, Electrolux and Volvo are household names. Finland’s role as the lone Nordic voice in the euro zone is a source of endless fascination for debt-crisis watchers. Norway’s swimming in oil and a key player in global energy markets.
A scribe with a Viking-like work ethic could be a factory of stories and videos fit for all sections of the paper and online. Requirements include a demonstrated ability to break news and write broad stories worthy of WSJ’s and DJN’s audience. Discuss the opportunity with your bureau chief and then contact me to get the process rolling.
Economics reporters say we’re better off than four years ago
by Chris Roush
Joe Strupp of Media Matters for America interviewed some of the industry’s most prominent economics reporters who believe that the country is better off economically than it was four years ago.
Strupp writes, “Other veteran financial scribes point to the overall economic picture today as compared to 2008, while also noting that the positive direction of the economy is important, too. Their comments are supported by a number of key indicators: The economy has grown for twelve consecutive quarters; private sector employment has grown for 29 consecutive months, adding millions of jobs; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has nearly doubled from its low point in March 2009.
“‘From an economic growth standpoint, clearly it is better,’ Kevin Hall, McClatchy’s national economics correspondent, said about the country’s finances.
“‘If you go back and look at the charts — you can pull up the GDP chart, we are growing 2 to 2.2 percent – you would say it is clearly yes, compared to a 3.7 percent contraction in the third quarter of 2008, followed by an 8.9 percent contraction in the fourth quarter of 2008.’
“He later added, ‘You look at how many jobs were lost, December ’07 to June 2009, 7.9 million jobs lost. That is a big, big number. That recession encompassed mostly the Bush era, but also four month of Obama. In the last 28 months, there’s been an increase of roughly 4.4 million jobs, which if you just look at that number, it is a tremendous growth period.’
“‘Clearly we are better off. I don’t know how you could say no,’ he stressed. ‘I think we have taken the steps to shore up our banking system, people have become more proactive in paying down debt, the American consumer has taken steps to be more responsible.’”
Read more here.
Ex-Dow Jones president to join Time Inc.
by Chris Roush
Todd Larsen, who left the role of president of Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, earlier this year, will take a job at Time Inc. overseeing its magazine unit, according to a story in The Journal.
Keach Hagey writes, “In his new role, Mr. Larsen will oversee some of Time Inc.’s high-profile titles, including Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. His hiring comes nine months after digital-advertising veteran Laura Lang took the reins of Time Inc.
“The creation of the news and sports group reverses a decision by Ms. Lang’s predecessor, Jack Griffin, who separated the groups. At the time, Mark Ford was placed in charge of the Sports Group, while John Q. Griffin—no relation—was placed in charge of the News Group. John Q. Griffin left Time Inc. in May 2011 and wasn’t replaced.
“Mr. Ford will report to Mr. Larsen, according to the people.
“Time Inc.’s news and sports titles face significant challenges. Sales of Time magazine, the company’s most prominent news title, were down 31% on the newsstand in the first half of the year, compared with the same period last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The number of advertising pages was down 19.1 % in the first half of the year, compared with a year earlier, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Time Worldwide Publisher Kim Kelleher left in July, and hasn’t yet been replaced.”
Read more here.
