Dow Jones expands online offering in Asia

• Investing online
• Bigger Asia focus
• Free content on offer
  

Hong Kong - Dow Jones has expanded the online edition of The Wall Street Journal Asia, offering a swag of free multi-media content to users across the region.

As part of the asia.WSJ.com launch, the Journal has expanded news teams in Hong Kong and New Delhi in a bid to provide more regionally relevant content and opened up its mobile offering to include more free content from the WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com, Barrons.com and AllThingsD.com. Asia users are also being offered a two-week free subscription trial for online content.

Banking group HSBC has signed on as the exclusive launch sponsor of both regional sites, with a campaign to run across European and Asian markets.

The latest launch continues a long run of online revamps, which in December last year included its Chinese-language site chinese.wsj.com.

Christine Brendle, publisher of The Wall Street Journal Asia and managing director in Asia of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group, said the launch of asia.WSJ.com "significantly extends" The Wall Street Journal Asia's reach and better serves the interests of users of its print and digital offerings.

The latest developments follow a Dow Jones statement that shows since News Corp acquired the company in December 2007, a US$100 million in operating cost have been achieved.

Collaboration with other News Corp newspapers, as well as freezing salaries for one year for all non-union employees and the closure of three production facilities have been named as some areas of cost saving.

In one such partnership, Dow Jones is now sharing services across the organisation with the New York Post in New York and The Wall Street Journal Europe and the newspapers of News International in London, resulting in "solid savings".