Online Media of the Year: Biz & Fin No. 9 Wall Street Journal
Published: Jun 01, 2007
Category: Business & Finance
Owned by: Dow Jones & Company
CEO, Dow Jones & Company: Richard F. Zannino
Executive vice president, Dow Jones & Company: Clare Hart
Publisher, The Wall Street Journal: L. Gordon Crovitz
Few publications in the world, or business publications, for that matter, can boast of the 31 Pulitzer Prizes for outstanding journalism that the Wall Street Journal has to its name. Nor can as many of them comfortably claim to be the leading business publication not just in any country or region, but also worldwide. This is probably the key reason why the publication's online version - The Wall Street Journal Online (WSJ Online), was ranked by Online Media of the Year survey respondents to be one of the top 10 business websites that marketers would most likely pump their advertising dollars into.
Founded over a century ago in 1889, the flagship publication of Dow Jones & Company has been faithfully providing its readers with trusted information and knowledge in empowering them to make better decisions. Collectively, The Wall Street Journal Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe and WSJ Online, which make up The Wall Street Journal franchise, enjoy a total circulation of 2.7 million. To date, WSJ Online is touted to be the largest paid subscription news site on the web, boasting a growth of 20% in paid subscriptions in the first quarter of 2007 - 931,000, up from last year's 774,000.
As a business site, WSJ Online garnered two times more votes from respondents with regional responsibilities as compared to those with local responsibilities although more respondents from companies of foreign origin voted for WSJ Online than did respondents from companies of local origin. An equal number of client-side and agency-side respondents voted for WSJ Online, a scenario which was different from most other candidates who either had more client-side or agency-side respondents rooting for them at any one time.
Across industry group, media-buying agencies gave the most votes to WSJ Online, followed by creative agencies, and business services. The difference however, between the voting patterns of those from media buying and creative agencies was that majority of the former tended to rank WSJ Online 2nd place while WSJ Online tended to have first place name recall with the latter group.
Similarly, by agency job function, WSJ Online garnered the most votes from the media buying folks and by client job function, WSJ Online enjoyed an equal weightage of votes from CEOs, marketing managers and communications/public relations and events managers. WSJ Online was ranked 1st by all marketing managers who voted for it and 2nd by majority of CEOs and communications/public relations and events managers who voted for it.
Not content with maintaining status quo, Dow Jones & Company has made recent innovations with Wall Street Journal and WSJ Online. The innovations included the redesign of the publication and a change in the Journal's approach to gathering and editing news. These changes, announced in January this year, can only assure advertisers of newer opportunities to reach Wall Street Journal''s audience across both print and online mediums in the days ahead.