Creating a global network

By Dave Lindorff

  The world's two leading business news organizations, Dow Jones and Reuters, announced plans yesterday to merge their interactive business information services in a new joint-venture internet company to be called Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive LLC.
   The new internet service will provide corporate customers with access to thousands of publications in 20 languages, as well as to the anchor services of the Reuters news system and all the Dow Jones publications. Customers will be able to use hot links in articles to find such information as the biographies of corporate executives or the financial information about companies cited.
   "This will entirely change the way corporations do research," claimed Timothy Andrews, president and CEO of the new company, speaking at a televised transatlantic press conference.
   Capitalized at an initial $225 million and owned 50/50 by the two partners, the new venture will compete for corporate customers in a market its founders predict will reach $6 billion by 2002, double its current size. Large users will be paying subscription fees of more than $1 million a year.
   The new company will rival two existing competitors in size, Nexus and Dialog, according to Dow Jones Chairman and CEO Peter R. Kann. But Reuters Chief Executive Peter Job said, "I don't think there is anything like the amount of intellectual property we will have here," when the two companies' existing internet services, Dow Jones Interactive and Reuters Business Briefing, combine.
   Within 45 days of the announcement of the new venture, existing customers of either of the two services are to have access to the other service at no additional cost, but the new combined internet product won't be available for another 12 months.
   Dow Jones now has 650,000 desktop customers for its Dow Jones Interactive service, while Reuters says its Reuters Business Briefing is subscribed to by 6,000 corporations. As 90 percent of Dow Jones Interactive customers are in North America, and 90 percent of Reuters customers are outside North America, the two services are "perfectly complementary" according to Kann.
   Because the new service will be subscription-funded, there are no advertizing opportunities at this point, though the system's links to myriad publications could open up ancillary possibilities by making those publications much more accessible to corporate readers.