Dow Jones & Company plans to launch The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition later this year as an online service to provide quick, more detailed and customized business news - a direct dig at Bloomberg.
Combining the search range of Dow Jones Factiva with WSJ.com, the service is also cheaper than the Bloomberg service at $49 per month. In comparison, Bloomberg's subscription is about $1,500 per month. The service will launch this November for company use only, and will expand to a broader audience in January.
The Journal reports:
The product is part of a flurry of efforts by news organizations to earn more revenue from their online offerings amid the wide availability of free news on the Internet. Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN.com and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper are among the many other enterprises that have sought to offer niche or in-depth information and charge for it.
The New York Times, for example, plans to launch a San Francisco edition of its paper on Friday that will include more local information. Separately, the Times this week also said it would cut another whopping 100 newsroom jobs, and its Q3 earnings, while not predicative of a media turnaround, beat analysts expectations.