Don’t go rushing off to subscribe – The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition will first be available in November only to big corporate customers. Mere mortals will have to wait until January to shell out for the premium business news service.
Pricing? If you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it. Actually, no price has yet been announced for the service. The first deals are being cut exclusively with “enterprise customers” who presumably are buying in bulk for key employees.
News Corporation’s Dow Jones & Company says the service launching next month wil offer news scoops, the latest in industry-specific breaking news and immediate analysis of customers’ industry sectors from Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal and the “rich collection” of 17,000 global business and news sources of Dow Jones Factiva.
“This really is a new model for the delivery of high-quality business news for a sophisticated audience. We are not imprisoned by a terminal and are thus able to produce a more contemporary Web-based news feed tailored to a sector, a company or an asset class. Readers will be able to create a virtual newswire and alert system that suits their specific business needs,” said Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and managing editor of the WSJ.
“We’ve designed The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition to deliver information without the overload,” said Clare Hart, Exec. VP, Dow Jones & Company, and president, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group.
RBR-TVBR observation: This is certainly in keeping with News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch’s goal of increasing subscription revenues from web access to the company’s Internet-based content.
As we noted after Murdoch’s most recent comments on the subject, the key is to charge for truly exclusive, unique or influential. People aren’t going to pay for content that’s available elsewhere for free.
