Keeping ahead of the content curve

Dow Jones' Clare Hart talks about the challenges of keeping up with the expanding media space, the decline in newspaper readership and ad revenue, and why standalone brands might be able to survive in this age of media consolidation.

Knowledge is power but if you are a content provider, keeping track of all that knowledge can be tricky as the media space expands ever more rapidly.

That's the challenge Clare Hart, executive vice president, Dow Jones & Company and president of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group faced in 2005, when the company started looking in earnest for the best ways to present its burgeoning library of news information to users. While the company has long tracked news events gleaned from mainstream media, it has had to widen its base to keep up with the new media expansion of blogs and online videos such as YouTube, or risk loss of its ability to offer comprehensive coverage to subscribers and in turn, consumer confidence in its products.

In revamping its product to become more user friendly, the most important thing to keep in mind, Hart says, is the user experience.

Driven by Dow Jones-Factiva's in-house product and technology team, the company got creative and came up with an intelligence-operated visualisation product which takes information from mainstream and online sources to deliver results in graphical formats.

"It's presenting a picture of what's going on and what is a company's share of voice rather than showing you a results list of article after article, and you can drill down into the visuals to look at things as you like such as a particular month in which there was story spike about an issue," Hart says, adding that user reaction to the visual search format has so far been positive.

"While there's always room for improvement, the situation is infinitely better than it was three to five years go because now there are real tools that can monitor the whole spectrum of news information from real-time news to current awareness, websites and blogs so you get a fuller complement of content. With the visualisation to show article mentions as a media metric, you can link back to the article to see how many of them are the result of a press release or originated from an as campaign that you're running," Hart says.

The head down south for newspaper readership and revenue

There was a time when there was no better destination for readers and advertisers than a newspaper - now however, the slowly accelerating decline in print ad revenue and readership has made it clear companies relying solely on print will struggle.

While Hart declined to comment on Dow Jones' recent acquisition by News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch, news points to Murdoch wondering aloud about the possibility of doing away with Dow Jones' flagship publication, The Wall Street Journal. While that doesn't look likely to happen soon as the bulk of the company's revenue still comes from print, there is no doubt online will be the main driver of future revenue growth. Dow Jones has already taken steps to hedge against the future by reducing its dependency on print revenue - in 2006, chief executive Richard Zannino made a public statement that the company would set a target for revenue from print to be set at 50% from 70% by 2009, with revenue from digital to make up for the rest.

"That was a deliberate strategy to ensure that while print is growing, we just grow digital faster," Hart says. "Last year when we acquired the remaining 50% of Factiva that Dow Jones didn't own, that already took us down to 60%."

You and me against media consolidation

At around the same time Murdoch announced his intention to acquire Dow Jones, electronic publisher Thomson Corporation announced its interest in acquiring the Reuters Group. As more independent companies get bought up by the big boys, can standalone news brands survive? Hart thinks they can - it all boils down to the brands and the quality of information.

"It comes down to execution either way - you have to smart about the way you build your business and how you invest," she says.

"It's all about listening to the customer, paying close attention content requirements and technology. As long as that's done, there'll be less risk you'll go wrong."

- By Clarice Chiam