Clare Hart, executive vice-president, Dow Jones & Company, and president, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, has spent a major part of her working life at the company that publishes the world’s largest business newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Having been acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2007, Dow Jones has major plans for India including a facsimile edition of The Wall Street Journal. Hart spoke to Shuchi Bansal on the company’s B2B and B2C operations but skirted queries on WSJ’s marketing strategy. Excerpts:
Are products from the Dow Jones Media Enterprise group available in India?
The website indiaWSJ.com is already available, the newswires exist and the Dow Jones company and executives exist. I should say they are all relatively new. We made a strategic decision to invest in this market last year. We had the budget approved in May 2008 and Mitya New joined as the managing director India in August to lead Dow Jones’ businesses here. Since then we have been building up our editorial as well as commercial staff.
The Media Enterprise business has three units: Content Technology Solutions, Dow Jones Indexes, and Dow Jones Financial Information Services. We are focused on serving 90 business segments including investment banking, management, sales and trading, wealth management, PR and corporate communications, B2B sales, risk and compliance, among others. About 65 per cent of our revenue is from financial services clients.
Are you expanding the B2B or B2C business in India?
Both. We are the only company in the world — probably besides one in Japan — that has a newspaper and a wire service. We already have an online Indian edition. We will be launching the facsimile edition of The Wall Street Journal very soon. At some point we are sure that media regulations will change.
How many copies of WSJ do you plan to print?
There is some internal idea which we’d not like to share. The strategy is to be available every morning in Delhi, Mumbai and in the main metros.
Will the content share relationship with Mint continue?
They are our partner. We are very happy with the relationship.
What’s the ratio of revenue generated from B2B versus B2C worldwide?
We are not public with our revenue figure any more. However, the B2C (print media products) business is well over half of the revenue, but the operating profit is largely B2B.
With the sudden slowdown, do you regret the decision to expand in India?
No. We have a firm view that we will be stronger coming out of this recession than going in. We believe this investment is the right investment for Dow Jones and the right investment for India. Mitya New is a very seasoned executive — he was the managing director for Reuters in India between 2000 and 2004. Everyone else we have hired so far is local. We don’t want to bring a lot of expats in.
That must be for cost reasons.
You can’t say that. I would say people in India are as good as people from abroad. We would not do better with expats. I have spent a fair amount of time with new employees and I would put them up against any one in any of our major markets. They will do well here but they could do well in New York or London as well.
What magnitude of investment are you making in India?
You could speculate from the number of people we are hiring. We will end up with the largest foreign-owned newswire operation in the next nine to 12 months. We’ll end up as a total team of about 120.
Newspapers are declining in most markets.
You know what’s going on with newspapers like San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and LA Times. Mostly regional newspapers are struggling. But WSJ is a large national newspaper with a global presence through its US, Europe and Asia editions. The second thing is that we have always charged online for our service. You can’t put Dow Jones in the class of newspapers. Newspaper is the flagship product, of course, but we monetise content and our digital revenue opportunity is significant. We are a business news and information services firm.
Is your print business losing money?
You can’t say that. More people are buying the Wall Street Journal and we have had a price increase. Our cover price is now $2. We probably have room to increase the price.
What’s been the change in the company after it moved from the Bancroft family to News Corporation?
It’s more global now. Its coverage is more global — the way we covered the earthquake in China, the terrorist attack and the Satyam situation here in India, has been exceptional.
Then there is access to capital. We made three acquisitions in the Enterprise Media business in 2008. It would not have happened as stand-alone Dow Jones. We acquired Betten Financial News, a Dutch language news service, as part our global strategy. We also acquired Generate, a content and technology company which helps us aggregate information about companies and executives — it has information on 28 million executives and 80 million companies.
The third was Library House in the UK at the very end of last year. The company keeps information on venture-backed companies. It did enrich our product and gave us geographical reach in the European market.
The third change is probably related to the first one. It is leveraging News Corp’s global resources. For example, in our expansion here we are very connected to STAR India.
