VIP Comparative Review of News Products
Jinfo Blog

25th November 2009

By Anne Jordan

Item

In August, Factiva's ultimate parent company, News Corporation, announced net losses of $3.4 billion for the year ending 30 June 2009. An article in the Financial Times speculated that parts of Dow Jones could be sold off, including Factiva, however News Corporation has communicated an ongoing commitment to Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group (EMG), the division which includes Factiva. Over the past 12 months EMG has completely reorganized its business around ten key customer and industry segments in order to leverage all Dow Jones news and content assets, including Factiva, and offer the right solutions for each segment. LexisNexis is approaching its 15th anniversary as part of Reed Elsevier. Reed has certainly suffered during the economic downturn, with advertising and promotion markets significantly impacted by global recession, however its interim results for the 6 months ending 31 July 2009 stated that the professional information businesses were relatively robust. Divestment focus has been in the area of trade and regional press. Despite the difficulties of the last 12 months, both Dow Jones and LexisNexis have invested in new functionality for their news offerings Factiva.com and Nexis. The forthcoming comparative review to be published in November's edition of VIP Magazine will discuss the enhancements and also some exciting new developments in the pipeline. In early 2009 the de-duplication facility in Factiva.com was extended to cover French, German, Spanish and Russian language content. There is also a new automated translation tool which will allow articles to be machine-translated from eight languages into English as well as English into the same eight languages. This is an interesting development for researchers and one to watch. Looking at its news offering, LexisNexis considers the launch of NexisDirect the most significant addition of the year. This was in beta testing at the time of the last review and has since been reviewed in the March 2009 edition of VIP Magazine. The development team is currently working on a new de-duplication facility which will be released early in 2010. This will not be restricted to certain date ranges but will cover all content on the service. It is encouraging to see that the vendors have addressed several of the issues highlighted as problems in last year's review. Factiva has added the ability to go back to previous pages as well as forward, when reviewing the search results list, and as mentioned above, Nexis is soon to launch a de-duplication facility. VIP subscribers receive the full report as part of their subscription. Non-subscribers can purchase this report at http://web.vivavip.com/go/shop/report/1530 Also available: VIP Report: Survey on News Needs and Preferences http://web.vivavip.com/go/shop/report/1524 Subscribe to VIP: http://web.vivavip.com/go/shop/subscribe/

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