Dow Jones & Company has acquired Betten Financial News BV, the Dutch-language news service covering the corporate sector in the Netherlands. Dow Jones will combine Betten’s coverage with Dow Jones Newswires’s Dutch-language financial news service, Dow Jones Nieuwsdienst, to offer its customers expanded reporting and strengthened insight into the Dutch financial markets. Betten is known in the Netherlands under the name Betten Beursmedia News. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

News Corp.’s agreed acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. for some $5 billion is clearly a newspaper play. It’s obvious that News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has long harboured the ambition to become a Citizen Kane-type proprietor of a respected and powerful newspaper, and The Wall Street Journal fits the bill, particularly if you take a look at the relatively low esteem of his other newspaper holdings.

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Dow Jones’ Rejection of Murdoch Proposal Kicks Prospect of Journal TV Channel into Touch While the market data world salivated (or something like that) over the prospect of a Reuters/Thomson Financial combination, the action that may in fact have triggered the idea was almost forgotten. Dow Jones & Co. rejected News Corp.’s offer to buy the company at $60 a share, and the prospect of Rupert Murdoch’s company coming up with a revised offer that would convince the controlling Bancroft family to sell the proverbial crown jewels appeared bleak.

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The last time Dow Jones had to worry about elementized data feeds was when TDQF, the Telerate Digital Quote Feed, formed part of its arsenal of feed offerings as part of Dow Jones Telerate, later known as Dow Jones Markets.

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The last time Dow Jones had to worry about elementized data feeds was when TDQF, the Telerate Digital Quote Feed, formed part of its arsenal of feed offerings as part of Dow Jones Telerate, later known as Dow Jones Markets.

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When Dow Jones and Reuters first got into bed together some years back to launch Factiva, their historical news joint venture, many of us wondered why two long-time enemies had suddenly kissed, made up and more. Now Dow Jones has agreed to buy Reuters’ share of the venture, we’re left with the same feeling. After all, if Reuters has been “the very good partner” Dow Jones said it had in its statement about the transaction, why rock the boat?

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PR Newswire has acquired U.S. Newswire from Medialink Worldwide for $19 million and an earn-out of up to $4 million. As part of the deal, U.S. Newswire vice president of sales and head of marketing communications Brian Taylor will join PR Newswire and lead the integration. Co-founder William McCarren will assume a new role within Medialink.

Dow Jones Newswires’ new News Archives offerings now include 20 years of history. Launched in April (Market Data Insight, May 2006), the archives now consist of Dow Jones news and information dating back to January 1986, including Dow Jones Newswires, all editions of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. Dow Jones News Archives enables back-testing of trading applications by traders and analysts, and the rules generated can be applied to the realtime Dow Jones news feed.

The fate of AFX News has been settled at last. When nothing came of Dow Jones’ sniffing around the service for the past year or two, parent Agence France-Presse signed an agreement last month to sell the newswire to Thomson Financial for an undisclosed sum.

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Dow Jones Newswires’ announcement last month (A-Team Insight, April 2006) of its new Archives for Algorithmic Applications (or Dow Jones News Archives for short) is one of several industry initiatives aimed at making textual content created for consumption by humans readily accessible by their replacements in the trading room: algorithmic trading engines.

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Reuters’ new English-language Gulf Financial News Service offers exclusive stories about the companies, markets, economies and the regulatory climate in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar. The service is available on all Reuters financial desktop products and to media clients. Edited from Dubai, Reuters’ Arabic-language Arabic News Service will also be integrated into the service.

The news business isn’t what it used to be.We know that from direct experience. But it applies even more to those stalwarts of our industry that ply the choppy waters of the real-time newswire business.

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Dow Jones made much new-media hullaballoo about its definitive agreement this month of MarketWatch. New media watchers suggested the acquisition would be the catalyst for sleepy old Dow Jones to join the land of the free content providers (remember them?) by adding nine million or so monthly MarketWatch visitors.

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Dow Jones Newswires has signed a series of new redistribution deals with third-party vendors. The U.S. newswire has widened to range of Dow Jones services available via Swiss market data vendor Infotec’s terminals in Europe to include MF-Dow Jones Italia, commodities and energy services, foreign exchange and fixed income services and U.K. Markets Report. Infotec’s Japanese subscribers, meanwhile, will gain access to Dow Jones’ Japan Money, Global Equities or Financial Wire services. Meanwhile, French market data vendor Fininfo has agreed to distribute a number of Dow Jones newswire services via its Front-Office FinWin Terminal system. Finally, Dow Jones renewed its contract with Reuters, former rival, now redistributor.

Having added MarketWatch to plug a gap left when Reuters pulled its feeds, as exclusively revealed in these pages (A-Team Insight, April 2004) , Thomson Financial has now extended its deal with its main optional news service provider, Dow Jones Newswires. Under the arrangement, Thomson will widen the range of Dow Jones services made available to clients via the Thomson ONE platform. In Europe, the additional services are Dow Jones Financial Wire, and one of a selection of local-language services including those in Dutch, French, German, Italian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. Global foreign exchange, bond and money-markets subscribers will receive Dow Jones Economic Report. In North America, Thomson extended its redistribution arrangement by four years, with the Dow Jones News Service marketed as an optional service on Thomson ONE and Capital Markets Report distributed via Thomson ONE Yield. Meanwhile, Thomson continues to build packaged news capabilities with MarketWatch.

Proquote, an Internet-based market data service owned by the London Stock Exchange, last month began distributing Dow Jones Newswires’ U.K. Markets Report. The service, which provides corporate, economic and business news likely to impact the U.K. financial markets, will be available as the primary news service to Proquote’s 1,700 subscribers. Separately, Proquote said TD Waterhouse has signed up for 500 user licenses in a deal that will boost the company’s total user count to 2,300.

Track Data has begun offering a hosted version of its NewsWatch news management capability. The service is now available independently of Track’s market data and electronic transaction services. Track has long offered NewsWatch as a supplementary system for handling news sources alongside its core data products. The system may be of increasing interest both to institutions and data service provides alike as news suppliers like Reuters and Dow Jones begin to limit the broad availability of their wire services.

Dow Jones Newswires has appointed Elisabeth Delbes head of vendor relations for Europe, Middle East and Africa, based in Paris. She will be responsible for expanding the newswire’s relationships with vendor redistributors and securing new vendor relationships. Delbes has been with Dow Jones since 1992, most recently with responsibility for mobile and consumer business. She reports to Tom Waite, director of sales and business development. Dow Jones also named Jak Riley vendor product manager, based in London. Riley, previously was a manager in the product marketing department, reports to Delbes.

Dow Jones is acquiring the news business of its long-time German partner VWD. Dow Jones will pay €9.8 million for VWD, and will simultaneously spin off VWD’s market data terminal businesses to a venture group headed by Edmund Keferstein, which will net Dow Jones €5.4 million, indicating a price of €4.4 million for VWD’s newswire and newsletters. VWD MD Michael Frank will join Dow Jones as managing director, Dow Jones Newswires Germany, and director of international business development, reporting to Michael Bergmeijer, vice president of international sales. The deal is the second recent acquisition by Dow Jones, after its purchase of VentureWire earlier this year. The company is said to be eyeing the European operations of AFX News, the majority of which was snapped up by Xinhua Financial Network last year.

Ah, the news business. Doncha just love it? Just when everyone’s talking about commoditization, oversupply and information overload, along comes a deal that gets everyone hot under the collar again.

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