What’s best for the business news reader?
Jinfo Blog

19th March 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

With scarcely a murmur, the Financial Times has shut down Newssift, the semantic based global business news aggregator it launched almost exactly a year ago. It’s just the latest turn of the screw in the malaise facing business news generally. In marked contrast to its upbeat launch (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e17206), the FT has now quietly pulled the plug on a tool which it originally hoped would enable business decision makers to conduct in depth qualitative analysis. paidContent:UK, which broke the news, reported an FT Group spokesperson as saying that, although the idea was good, the fact that the launch coincided with the advertising downturn was ‘unfortunate’ (http://digbig.com/5bbggh). Commenting earlier on year-end results from the FT’s owner Pearson (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27877 for LiveWire coverage of this), paidContent:UK had in fact already made clear that the FT was very much exposed to the advertising downturn, despite increasing its reliance on subscriptions (http://digbig.com/5bbggj). The demise of Newssift only serves to emphasise the point – and to add to the concern that information managers should be feeling about the future availability of quality original business news. In its latest annual State of the News Media report, the US-based Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism highlights ‘enormous’ revenue losses in the industry as a whole, and little evidence that journalism online has found a sustainable revenue model. ‘Unless some system of financing the production of content is developed, it is difficult to see how reportorial journalism will not continue to shrink, regardless of the potential tools offered by technology,’ it concludes (http://digbig.com/5bbggk). Nevertheless a recent client insight from Outsell sees increasing competition for the business news reader specifically. Advertising aimed at this group still fetches higher effective cost per thousand rates – especially as companies narrow their targeting to business niches – and such readers are more likely to pay for the news itself, analyst Ken Doctor concludes (http://digbig.com/5bbggm – available to Outsell subscribers only). That focus on business readers is coming mostly from large, increasingly global news purveyors, Outsell continues. Which may perhaps explain recent developments at Thomson Reuters and the FT. The FT has just launched a new online platform for publishers with syndication agreements, offering up to 20% more content and advanced features to help them find and make best use of the FT journalism most relevant to their requirements (http://digbig.com/5bbggn). And in the States, Thomson Reuters has started offering Reuters Financial Infographics – a service providing newspapers with visualisations of key financial news and data, customisable and all ready for printing (http://digbig.com/5bbggp). As local business news gathering becomes ever less economically viable, activities like competitor analysis become ever more compromised. Sure, information managers want a good deal on their business news costs – but diversity matters too.

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