My Favourite Tipples from a Business Strategy Specialist
Jinfo Blog

By Andrew Lucas

Abstract

Andrew Lucas is a specialist in content and business strategy in the information sector and needs to keep up with developments in the industry as well as carrying out in-depth research. He shares his favourite tipples.

Item

As a director of FinTech Partners (UK) I work with a wide range of companies. My particular focus is on content and business strategy for information vendors as well as producers and consumers of content. I am also an occasional contributor to FreePint, which allows me to look a range of information products.

I make use of a diverse range of information products depending on what I am working on, but my recurring requirements fall into two broad areas: keeping abreast of developments in the information market, and research.

Current Awareness

To keep up-to-date with what is happening in the information industry I use a number of free email alerting services, including:

• Gigaom: This provides a good general overview of what is happening with new technology. I subscribe to the daily Media and Europe newsletters. Although I preferred the media coverage in its previous incarnation as paidContent, which Gigaom acquired in 2012, it still keeps me up to date with the latest developments in technology.

• Nieman Journalism Lab: The Nieman Lab describes itself as attempting to “help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age” and provides interesting media analysis. The coverage includes long form articles which often provide good insights and thoughtful exploration of media issues. The Week in Review email alert provides a useful round-up of the stories it is covering each week.

• Outsell: This has a daily Information Industry Headline email alert which delivers a good selection of information industry news and covers many of the companies I am interested in.

Research

For in-depth research I use a range of information resources that are appropriate to the particular project; however I continue to find value in the traditional aggregators, including:

• Factiva and Nexis remain invaluable research tools with their huge range of sources and refined search capabilities. Although they are expensive services, they are sometimes the only way to find the information you need in the time available.

• Newsdesk from Moreover Technologies provides a lower cost alternative to the Factiva and Nexis, albeit without many of the premium sources, but it does have excellent search capabilities.

An article in FreePint which I found particularly interesting:

• Lex Fenwick Leaves Dow Jones; What's Next on the Factiva Rollercoaster? Lastly, I would not want to miss out FreePint which also provides excellent in-depth coverage of the information sector. As a former Dow Jones executive I thought the recent coverage of the roll-out of DJX and the subsequent senior management changes was very insightful.

Editor's Note:

FreePint Subscribers can log in to read and share more about Andrew's favourite resources in FreePint's Mini Review: Newsdesk and Anne Jordan's most recent source updates on Factiva and Nexis.

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