Dow Jones News/Retrieval

~ the goodbye ~

Dow Jones News/Retrieval was priced at $2.30 a minute during business hours. That is not a consumer number. It is a number that only survives contact with a customer who is being paid to read, on a terminal owned by a firm, with the invoice going to a department that has a line item for it. I have never had an information budget, and the distance here is not region or era. It is who the bill was addressed to.

The service began in 1973, which puts it a decade ahead of almost everything else in this category. Dow Jones already ran a news wire into brokerage offices. Turning that wire into a searchable database was a smaller step for them than starting an online service from nothing was for anybody else, and it is the reason a newspaper company got there before the computer companies did.

What was in it was quotes and text. Prices for stocks, bonds, options, mutual funds. The Wall Street Journal and Barron's, in full, on the day of publication. Then the odd consumer layer that every service of that era bolted on to justify a home subscription: sports scores, movie reviews, an encyclopedia, a shopping section, mail. In the 1990s it added the New York Times and Westlaw, which is the point where it stopped pretending to be a home product at all.

Subscriptions went from eleven thousand in 1981 to two hundred and five thousand in 1986. That is the home computer curve, and it is the only period when this service had ordinary people in it. Thirty dollars to start, twelve a year to stay, then the meter. Off hours it dropped to forty four cents a minute for the basic material and $1.76 for the detailed reports, which is how you can tell what the company thought was actually valuable.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the meter ~

Per-minute pricing does something to how a document gets read. You do not browse. You arrive with a query, take what answers it, and leave, because the cost of thinking on the connection is measurable in dollars. Every retrieval service of the era worked this way and every one of them produced the same user behavior: search, print, disconnect, read the printout.

The web ended that argument in about four years. Once the Journal was on a website with a flat annual subscription, no professional was going to defend a meter to their finance department, and once free news sites existed the consumer half of the business had no reason to exist at all. In the mid 1990s the company rebuilt the thing as Dow Jones Interactive under Timothy M. Andrews, with simplified pricing and browser access, and pointed it squarely at corporate buyers rather than individuals.

~ what really happened ~

In may 1999 Dow Jones and Reuters put their business information units into a joint venture called Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive, which was renamed Factiva about six months later. Dow Jones Interactive was worth roughly $125 million in annual revenue going into that arrangement, and the plan from the start was to merge its customers into the new product.

It was switched off on 30 june 2003. Nothing dramatic happened that day. The subscribers had been migrating to Factiva for years and the closure was the last step of a transition rather than a failure. Dow Jones bought out the Reuters half for $160 million in 2006, and in 2007 the whole company went to News Corp, so the archive that started as a wire into brokerage offices in 1973 now sits inside Rupert Murdoch's holdings.

~ what got buried with it ~

The interesting casualty is the idea that a newspaper could be a database company. Dow Jones was there in 1973, twenty years before the web, with a product that proved people would pay significant money for fast structured access to news text. Almost no other publisher drew the conclusion in time, and the ones that did mostly sold the capability to somebody else.

What replaced it is not free. Factiva is still sold and still expensive, invisible to anybody outside a firm with a subscription to it, and the general public reads the same journalism through advertising instead. Both models were running side by side in 1995 and only one of them was ever going to be the one ordinary readers saw.

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