Now you might think of Dow Jones as an old-fashioned, old-media company. And in many ways we are very traditional indeed. Over decades, we have tried to set the standard for old-fashioned virtues such as independence, accuracy and fairness in our reporting of business news. Or think of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the one-number authoritative indicator for how the world's major market is doing.

But when it comes to business models, we at Dow Jones are happy to be considered by the purveyors of faddism, such as Michael Wolff, as the anti-establishmentarians. This goes all the way back to Charles Dow and Edward Jones, who over a century ago had several radical ideas. One was that there was a better way to distribute market-moving news than by hand, as was the prevailing model of the time. Thomas Edison patented the Ticker machine as a way to encourage use of electricity. Wall Street was the country's first area to be "electrified," and Dow and Jones began to distribute their market-moving news through the Ticker.

Suddenly, the phrase "real time" entered the vocabulary. Soon thereafter, they had another idea. They decided to re-use some of that news to help found a neighborhood newspaper -- The Wall Street Journal, whose neighborhood is now the world, in print and online. This was an early example of what we might describe at conferences such as this as leveraging B-to-B content to a broader B-to-C market.

This also means that Dow Jones has been both an electronic and print publisher, serving both B-to-B and B-to-C customers for virtually all of our history. We have both a newswire and a newspaper -- unlike other wire services or other newspapers. This gave us a huge, unfair competitive advantage when the Internet permitted broad electronic distribution of content because the Wall Street Journal Online has been able to draw from Dow Jones Newswires, making it a 24/7 updated site, now publishing some one million fresh pages a day.

We also took an alternative view to the idea popular for so long -- for far too long -- among almost all publishers that content had to be free on the Web. We knew from our Dow Jones Newswires and from Factiva (our joint venture with Reuters), with more than one-half billion dollars in annual revenue between them, that people would pay for quality content delivered electronically. But Internet gurus said that no one would ever pay for content on the Web.

We never understood why publishers would give away brands and content on the Web that they charge for in another medium, such as print. Last week, we reported that we now have 712,000 paying subscribers to the Online Journal. This is a larger subscriber base, by the way, than for all but six U.S. newspapers. And so contrary to what Michael Wolff said about the media not being able to hold an audience, the Journal franchise now reaches a record 2.7 million subscribers in print and online.

And while I'm on the Michael Wolff topic, let me correct just one more of his statements this morning. Wolff claimed there was a report that Dow Jones controlling shareholders had indicated that they would welcome an offer by the Washington Post Co. to buy the company. He seemed to have been referring to an article in The New Yorker magazine some time ago, which did report on this topic, but in fact reported the opposite -- that the controlling shareholders had no interest in selling the company. Perhaps Michael Wolff should spend more time with reliable sources of news and information and less time with his own uninformed ruminations. There are impressionable investment bankers in the audience, and I don't want any of you to be misled by his misstatement.

Let me close with a couple of themes that may be counter to other current business fads. One is that branded, proprietary content is more, not less, valuable in an age of information overload. Last week, we announced that our acquisition of MarketWatch is now complete. For Dow Jones, this adds a new brand and content that reaches a much larger audience of people interested in financial news than we have ever been able to serve. This means we publish the largest subscription new site on the Web -- the Online Journal -- and the largest free site for financial and markets news for individual investors -- MarketWatch. We're also the largest publisher of proprietary financial news on the Web, reaching some 9 million unique visitors per month.

Another theme is that is that the full value of content comes when it is delivered in context. The latest fad is free search engines, which indeed are excellent tools for directory searches such as to find a Web address. More sophisticated information needs, however, require something else: reliable sources, delivered in relevant context.

Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters joint venture, delivers access to 8,000 selected, trusted news sources, and only after applying 300,000 different codes and indexes to the news, which can be delivered to any one on an infinite number of track folders. As a result, this product delivers only relevant and highly filtered results. This is a premium, enterprise product, reaching some 1.6 million business executives and other professionals. Companies are happy to pay more for delivery of less content, so long as the content that is delivered is in the precise context it is needed.

Sometimes, alternative business models flow from very traditional notions of sound business practices. Many consumers, whether B-to-B or B-to-C, are willing to pay for content delivered online. They value old-fashioned qualities like strong brands and trusted content. If that content can be delivered in context, so much the better. Advertisers value scale, brands and access to high-quality audiences. The Web did not change laws of economics. But the Web has broadened the business opportunities for those in the information industry who are not afraid to try new business models, even if it means going against the latest fads.



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