Murdoch Wall Street Journal Factiva: Known Unknowns
June 10, 2016
That Donald Rumsfeld statement about known knowns, known unknowns, etc. Is back. The Wall Street Journal ran an ad for Factiva. You remember Factiva. It is the Dow Jones Information Service repositioned and renamed a number of times over the last 15 or 20 years.
If you are into for fee search, you will know about Factiva and its kissing cousins: LexisNexis (bring your legal client’s purchase order), CSA ProQuest Dialog (bring your library acquisition budget), and Ebsco (bring your credit card). For fee information services serve the professional searcher market. Most people — including Gen X and Millennials researchers — are happy with Google. Objective results every time.
The for-fee services are still around. Public library and university fund raising programs help pay for access. Some queries returning zero useful results can cost $100 or more. Hey, you didn’t know, right?
If you navigate to the June 2, 2016, Wall Street Journal, page A7 in my dead tree edition ran a full page ad for Factiva. The ad highlights a couple of pie charts. Here they are in a tough to read gray and blue motif. Users of commercial database services have really sharp eyes and don’t need high contrast text, right?
The first pie chart shows your life consumed with research. Notice how little time one has to eat lunch. Note what a tiny portion of one’s day is available for email, Facebook, talking with colleagues, making sales calls, printing, the youth soccer telephone tree.
Now look at the second chart.
Look at the many different tasks one can undertake in a single work day. One can, of course, “take lunch.” I eat lunch, but that’s because here in rural Kentucky, we “eat” a meal. We make decisions. Apparently in Factiva land one takes a meal and probably takes decisions.
Other tasks one can pursue when one has Factiva are:
- Collaborating across departments
- Advise colleagues
- Stay on top of the news (Hey, it is part of that real journalism outfit owned by Mr. Murdoch. No bugging telephones, please.)
- Create a company newsletter. (I assume this word is “blog”, a Snapchat, or a tweet, but I could be off base.)
- Build powerful infographics. (Hmmm. I thought art types created infographics based on the data generated by a business intelligence system.)
- Research. Yes via Factiva.
Now I know that I am really out of the flow. The diagram showing the different between Baby Boomers and Millennials created by ace research analyst Mary Meeker reminded me of the gulf between my demographic and the zippy millennials.
Slide 51 from the Meeker, State of the Internet report.
The main point for me is that I possess zero of the attributes of millennials. I don’t earn to spend. I am retired. I conserve to pay for the old age home which I believe millennials call “opportunities for bingo.”
But the best part of the Factiva ad is the copy. I know words. Those nifty pie charts were the cat’s pajamas, weren’t they?
Here’s the guts of the message:
Spend your day working, not searching. Factiva’s reputable sources, flexible search and powerful insights provide access to thousands of quality, licensed, news and information sources in 28 languages. Know unknowns. [Emphasis added]
If Ms. Meeker is correct in her research and the supporting information from Hillhouse Capital and dozens of what appear to be primary sources and many hours of online searching commercial and Web resources — messaging apps are where the future is. Oh, there are videos too, but the takeaway is that traditional methods of getting digital information are in the same spot newspapers were yesterday.
The ad warrants several questions:
- Why does it have to be so darned big? Maybe small ads in the Wall Street Journal are ignored?
- How many of the Wall Street Journal’s readers are information specialists trained in the use of commercial online services? Judging from the Special Library Association’s challenges, I would suggest that the ad would have made sense to the corporate information specialist working in 1986, not 2016.
- What’s with the wonky pie charts? When I worked at a commercial database company, I don’t recall meeting any online users who spent the bulk of every day online. There were reference interviews (remember them, millennials?), culling the outputs from dot matrix printers, and planning search strategies before going online and whacking away.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s statement about knowns and unknowns emerged from his brush with the murky world of government related information. If he were to use Factiva today, would he have modified this famous statement:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
Perhaps Factiva, like IBM Watson, is easier to describe than turn an information search system into a lean, mean, money making machine? I would suggest that the answer for decades has been an unknown unknown.
Stephen E Arnold, June 10, 2016
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