Quality Journalism Chases New Revenue Angles
December 20, 2009
I live in rural Kentucky so news doesn’t reach the goose pond as it does in a real city. I noticed in my hard copy Wall Street Journal, page W13 (?!) for December 19, 2009, an advertisement with the headline, “Engage journalists and bloggers with the perfect pitch.” There is also a news release on MarketWatch—part of the for fee service available on the Sony eBook reader—about this Dow Jones product. Paying for marketing collateral strikes me as an interesting approach. Charging Sony WSJ subscribers for a marketing pitch. That’s better than Google’s subsidizer model in my opinion.
Image source: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/242/446538765_bfa89f9875.jpg
With news of the London Evening Standard, owned by a certain high profile Russian business person (Alexander Lebedev, an alleged former KGB professional, I wondered about the combination of “journalists” and “bloggers”. Obviously media ownership and the economic crisis makes strange bedfellows. I thought “journalists” were a breed apart from “bloggers”. I am not even a blogger. I am an addled goose and marketing shill, flogging my studies chock full of patent references and the odd Latin or Greek phrase. This high quality journalism business is too sophisticated for mere waterfowl.
I plunged forward in the full page advertisement from the Wall Street Journal about the Wall Street Journal’s software. The product carries the name of Dow Jones, which is a unit of News Corp. As you know, the News Corp. stands for quality journalism and premium content. (I wrote about paying more for the Sony digital WSJ than the hard copy recently. I think the price difference was about $140. The paper edition was cheaper! I find that hard to grasp, but the addled goose was never a top notch economist like those employed by News Corp.)
The idea which I gleaned from a quick trip to http://www.dowjones.com/product-mrm.asp is:
a news-enabled media database and journalist/blogger contact management tool that helps communications professionals pinpoint and engage the right influencers and quickly evaluate the outcome of their media relations activities. Dow Jones links its global collection of traditional and social media with journalist and blogger contact, profile, beat and pitch data so that media relations professionals can easily understand what journalists and bloggers are writing about today and then easily correlate resulting media coverage to their efforts.
I as skimmed the marketing information for this product, I got the impression that this product allows a person with a story idea or a marketer to develop a mailing list and crank out a bunch of targeted emails. I don’t know about you, but I thought this sounded a bit like a spamming program or spamming system.
According to FinChannel.com:
The launch marks the further expansion of Dow Jones’s workflow solutions for communications professionals. The company’s media monitoring and media evaluation tools are used by Global Fortune 2000 companies, public relations agencies, government and nonprofits to research campaigns faster and more thoroughly, stay ahead of breaking news, monitor social media conversations, detect issues earlier, measure campaign effectiveness and easily share campaign results with executives and employees.
Here’s what the software can do, according to the Dow Jones Web site:
Craft highly relevant and personalized pitches, increasing the likelihood that your story will be covered… Understand at a glance what journalists and bloggers are covering today and how best to contact them … Fine tune your contact list to those most likely to be interested … Find the right editorial opportunity for your story … Email a personalized pitch that will get results.
In order to buy the product, Dow Jones provides a “contact me” button. You can also download a free eBook. I found that interesting because books are subject to considerable scrutiny these days. I suppose a book that is about buying a product from Dow Jones is different from the content provided in the newspaper. I think marketing collateral is “free” and okay to use.
You can download a fact sheet and learn about other Dow Jones marketing programs like Insight, which I don’t fully understand because I didn’t bother to download the brochures on these topics. I must admit that I did not visit the “Knowledge Center”. The addled goose has a tough enough time understanding a commercial spam system, thank you very much.
I do understand one thing. Not a single word about the cost of this system. Other thoughts:
- I wonder if those spams urging me, a subscriber to the hard copy newspaper, to take out another subscription were generated by this system?
- Who makes the determination about journalists in the database?
- Who makes the determination about bloggers in the database?
- What are the rules for removing a person or entity from the database?
- What are the tracking mechanisms in place for licensees; that is, what does Dow Jones collect about the users of its software?
- How does the email blast get around spam filters?
Interesting stuff. Right up there with the free Evening Standard and the Washington Post’s running stories from Web logs as hard content.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 20, 2009
Okay, okay, another disclosure. A freebie. Who is the oversight authority today? I will report the non paid status of this article to none other than the Council on Environmental Quality. Keep information pure, I say.
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