Speculation on Dow Jones information assets
Jinfo Blog

27th August 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Terrible year-end results for News Corporation, exacerbated by the premium price paid for Dow Jones including its flagship Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago, have fuelled informed speculation that Rupert Murdoch may be considering selling parts of Dow Jones off. Reporting a net $3.4 billion loss for the year (http://digbig.com/5bafjj), News Corp also said that lower WSJ advertising revenues and reduced revenue from Dow Jones information services had more than offset the ‘aggressive’ cost cutting at DJ reported earlier this year (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16216 for background). Now the Wall Street Journal itself has reported that Dow Jones may be sounding out potential buyers for its stock market indexing business, including the 125 year old Dow Jones Industrial Average (http://digbig.com/5bafjk – subscription required). This has led the Financial Times to consider whether other Dow Jones assets could be sold off as well. The FT reports that, following the News Corporation bid, ‘a consensus took hold’ among staff and analysts that, besides the indices operation, the Factiva news database could also be sold off to offset some of the acquisition costs (http://digbig.com/5bafjm – registration or subscription may be required). Meanwhile, though, taking soundings among industry experts now, the FT has listed various potential buyers for the indexing business, including two possible new entrants: Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg. At the moment speculation is focusing on this one Dow Jones business. But the FT is talking in terms of Dow Jones ‘assets’, which leaves one wondering whether, as a newspaper man, Murdoch might be willing to see Factiva go for the sake of bolstering the WSJ as it makes its risky transition from his initial intention to make it completely free (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e2621) to his current view that free content is a ‘malfunctioning business model’ (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22056). It’s less than three years since Reuters sold its stake in Factiva, leading to the service’s further development first exclusively within Dow Jones and subsequently within News Corporation (see the VIP magazine interview with Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group President Clare Hart for background on this – purchase details at http://web.vivavip.com/go/shop/magazine/55). Could there ever be a time when Thomson Reuters decides to have it back?

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