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From portfolio- to vertical-oriented: the new strategic alignment behind Dow Jones’ brands

Dow Jones is more than simply the index that bears its name. Its stable of publications – including the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, and many more – are vital for those working in the fields of energy, financial markets, commodities trading and many more.

Since Almar Latour came in as CEO back in 2020, however, a deliberate attempt to better cater to its audience ultimately changed how those publications are aligned and operated behind the scenes. 

The change allowed the various teams at Dow Jones to focus on serving audiences based on verticals and sectors, instead of a strict portfolio-oriented model. In turn, that opened up new avenues for growth through tech and editorial acquisitions. 

By moving to a new way of thinking about audiences, Dow Jones radically altered how it can serve them – and, in doing so, inoculated itself against some of the disruption that is set to emerge over the next few years.

Redefining ‘audience’

Emma O’Brian is SVP Strategy for Dow Jones. She told The Publisher Podcast that she sees the current upheaval across the media landscape as being ‘destabilisation in three parts’.

The first is that of distrust in national media brands. She notes that has been brought into stark focus by the political situation, in which many elections have increased polarisation in the news media. However, she says that that has acted as a ‘galvanising opportunity’ for the media to think about how to best serve audiences:

“I do believe that having a clear sense of direction and understanding of who your audience is is absolutely paramount for being able to deliver the most relevant, most factual and most important journalism to specific audiences. So if you're a local news organization, you have to understand who your peers are, who your communities are.”

For Dow Jones, whose audiences are information-hungry professionals looking for insights around a vertical, that presents a new way to think about audiences – and how to serve them with a vertical-oriented publishing strategy.

O’Brian says: “The journey that we've been on since Almar Latour became CEO in 2020 was really to help us move from a portfolio strategy to a more enhanced ecosystem where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We have realigned our brands and those audience segments based on verticals and business and audience types.”

In practice that means creating packages for audiences that take the relevant insights from a variety of titles from the portfolio, and distilling them down into a personalised bulletin of news and information. It means that audiences are getting a wider view of the trends and news that impact their profession, instead of a blinkered view of a vertical on its own. 

O’Brian explains: “We have those reporters, but we also have major expertise in our other verticals… [you] are now also understanding that there's volatility in other areas that do affect you. And guess what? We have services and information to help you understand that as well.”

For example, the team has built an energy insider newsletter for Barron's subscribers – which it monetises separately from Barron's – to provide insights on the energy space to investors. That would not be possible were it not for the investments in synergy between different verticals.

Tech acquisitions, past and future

That approach to interlinking the verticals has readily apparent benefits to a company like Dow Jones. The events teams share expertise, for example, and there are multiple other examples of synergy between the titles and brands within the portfolio.

O’Brian notes that the shift after Latour took over has also impacted tech acquisition strategy: “And then, when we're looking at acquisitions and when we're thinking about our growth strategy… because we're working on this platform approach, anything that we bring in might come in via a discussion around or a specific strategy around enhancing a vertical or one of our businesses, but it also has to be something that we can incubate and move across the entire portfolio.”

That is especially true when it comes to investing in tech, specifically artificial intelligence (AI). That is where much of the disruption over the next few years is set to come from, as AI platforms seek to usurp the role of legacy publishers in keeping people informed. 

It will take time for that to happen: O’Brian notes that we are just in the foothills of the use of AI for news publishers, and that much of the use of AI across the internet is currently a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ approach. 

However, given the wealth of information and data to which the Dow Jones portfolio has access, that need not be the case. Instead, she explains that the brands can train LLMs on that accurate and structured data to create new products for its audiences.

“We're on a gold mine of regularly updated new information. The reason OpenAI is making so many licensing agreements is because they see the value of that. 

“We have gold and it's gold in and gold out. So we really need to, as an industry, continue to appreciate that we have trusted information. We now have the technology to extract high amounts of data from our unstructured data – our news articles – and so we have to unlock that. And we are working on it.”

In doing so, the teams at Dow Jones will be able to provide more context for their reporting, bringing expertise from across its many titles. And, as O’Brian explained, that is where she sees Dow Jones setting itself apart from competition over the next few years.

The North Star

I noted during the interview that some media companies with portfolios as diverse as Dow Jones’ have a difficult time making the different titles pull together. Others, like the Financial Times portfolio, have implemented a ‘North Star’ approach designed specifically to alleviate that problem.

O’Brian pointed out that B2B and information-based publishers often have an easier time with that. After all, their raison d’etre is to provide the best possible information to relevant audiences as and when they need it. It’s a straightforward mission, and not one that B2C publishers with titles across the political spectrum or vastly different audiences can count on.

She states that the singular goal of Dow Jones, threaded through its titles, is to provide transparency in times of volatility, and “that's how we assess our value”. To that end, the closer collaboration between verticals allows the various teams to provide much-needed context for each vertical, from that shared pool of insight.

However, she also noted that there is always a need for alignment and realignment, to take advantage of the synergies mentioned above. More importantly, she said, doing internal marketing helps keep Dow Jones’ various teams abreast of opportunities:

“Being able to show and tell examples of where [a strategy] has borne out is really part of the thing. We've built out our communications team to be really dynamic in this way: they're in every meeting. They're in every conversation, because there's a consistency of message that needs to happen internally and externally. And we've found that to be very powerful.”

It’s a reminder that, even for a company as well-versed in providing relevant information as Dow Jones, there is a need for internal as well as external reportage. It is only by keeping diffuse teams informed that a media business can take advantage of vertical-oriented realignments and tech synergies.

Studies have found that few publishers convert more than 10% of their audience to paying subscribers. But mitigating churn and fostering retention is challenging in today’s landscape. So what are media and publishing companies to do?

Find out what the leading causes of subscriber churn are, why first-party data is the key to growth and profitability, and what strategies you can employ to retain subscribers and reduce churn in BlueConic’s free resource, A Publisher’s Guide to Mitigating Churn and Increasing Subscriber Retention.

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