Dow Jones Starts 2010 with a Reorg
Jinfo Blog

5th January 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

Item

In an internal memo made public by PaidContent on January 4 (http://digbig.com/5bawrm), Dow Jones' CEO Les Hinton announced that the company's B2B arm, the Enterprise Media Group, would be folded into its consumer unit. The newly unified Dow Jones will be headed by Todd Larsen as president of Dow Jones, while Clare Hart, EVP of the Enterprise Media Group, will leave the company. In his memo, Hinton says 'Clare has been a dedicated and much-valued executive in the two years since I joined Dow Jones. I have greatly valued Clare�s advice, support, and hard work, and wish her well in the future.' Kind words aside, Hart, who joined Dow Jones in 1983, appears to have gotten the short end of the stick in the shuffle, one which was perhaps just a matter of time after News Corp (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) acquired Dow Jones in August 2007. That acquisition came shortly after the company had divided itself into three groups: Enterprise Media Group, Consumer Media Group, and Local Media Group (which Hinton says in his memo is unaffected by the reorg.) Hart was involved with Dow Jones' flagship B2B partnership effort with Reuters, Factiva, from its inception, and rose to become Factiva CEO in 2000. Once the Reuters partnership ended and Factiva became a wholly owned DJ subsidiary, it was folded into the Enterprise Media Group, of which Hart had became president in 2006. In Hinton's memo, he mentions a reality of a Web 2.0 world: 'Whether our products are created and offered by the old �enterprise� or �consumer� groups, we must remember that the end user is often the same person and make sure our appeal contemplates all our possibilities.' Melding enterprise and consumer functions within DJ may make that challenge easier to address. The more cynical view is to say that News Corp., a diversified global consumer media company at heart, was never really comfortable with its enterprise businesses, especially during 2009 when it was being battered by the recession (see Anne Jordan's LiveWire post http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27248 for detail.) While the Factiva database continues innovate and add functionality, as we found in our November Big 2 review of news database products (see http://web.vivavip.com/go/shop/report/1530 for information), there's no doubt but that Hart's departure could signal changes ahead.

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