INTERNET--(esecurities.W)--April 23, 1999 - [MKTW Competitor] Dow Jones Launches Free Business Portal
Dow Jones and Company, no stranger to Internet publishing, will launch in May dowjones.com, a free portal service aimed at business users.
The portal will seek a more general audience than that of the company's two existing paid online services, Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and Dow Jones Interactive. Subscribers to those services will get more in-depth material than what is available on dowjones.com.
But dowjones.com will draw from resources within and outside Dow Jones itself. The new portal "gives us the opportunity to serve a business audience that is not being served all that well on the Web, with information tailored to what the businesspeople need to do their jobs," says Neil Budde, editor of Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and vice president of Dow Jones Interactive Publishing.
"There is a lot of useful information for businesspeople (on the Internet), but nobody is providing a tool to pull it all together," Budde notes.
Through the portal, you'll be able to search for business information from more than 2000 sites selected by Dow Jones editors.
"There will be a lot of linking out (of the portal), but there will also be a fair amount of information in the site itself," Budde says. The portal will feature material by Dow Jones editors, which will link to business resources from Dow Jones and other publishers.
The decision to produce dowjones.com is "a no brainer," says Michael Beebe, a media analyst at Goldman Sachs.
"It is the right strategy for Dow Jones to leverage its very strong core franchise into a growing marketplace in a new medium. They see a lot of interest in the Internet--a lot of people have been information-empowered. Dow Jones has done an incredible job of building Wall Street Journal online for executives, but [it doesn't] meet the needs of a broader consumer user of business news and information. Dowjones.com is the right way to approach a broader market."
Pay Option
The new service joins, but does not replace, Dow's subscription services.
"One of the things we're trying to make clear is that there will be a substantial difference between what you get as a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and what you get on dowjones.com," Budde says. "There will be a lot of interactive value and interesting content on dowjones.com, but not the in-depth news and other features that you find as a subscriber to Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition."
However, as they can with the subscription services, portal users can pay a little extra to get a little more. Dow Jones will sell what Beebe calls "premium content."
"If you are very interested in one particular stock, company, or industry, you can search the database for free and see headlines come up. You can then choose to purchase access to those articles," Beebe notes.
Dow Jones will fund dowjones.com largely through advertising, and has commitments for $3 million in ads this year."
SOURCE: © 04/23/1999 PC WORLD NEWS by Mark Brownstein, special to PC World April 23, 1999, 4:38 p.m. PT
pcworld.com |
