17 Oct 2009
Thoughts on the Breakingviews and BusinessWeek Deals
In response to Let’s Make a Deal:
That Breakingviews stuck to its plan and succeeded is, I agree, remarkable. My sense is that opinion/hard-hitting analysis has generally been thought to be more valuable than straight news, in terms of dollars and cents, over the past few years.
My takeaway from these deals is that companies that want to own news and analysis content — i.e. traditional journalism — also realize the need to have separate, more stable and high margin sources of income. Bloomberg and ThomsonReuters have their established data businesses and Dow Jones is supported by News Corp., which rakes in enough money from many sources worldwide (especially TV) to support significant ongoing investment in Dow Jones’ growth, in addition to sustaining the perpetually money-losing New York Post. McGraw-Hill has S&P but, it would seem, couldn’t make the balance work as the other companies in similar positions have.
Bloomberg said they wanted BusinessWeek to have a more direct line into the C-suite, which makes sense to me — especially for ~$15M, which I’d guess is a deal. Why would ThomsonReuters buy BreakingViews if not to stop Bloomberg or Dow Jones from having it exclusively? Licensing the content would likely be cheaper. My impression is that ThomsonReuters is looking to get more aggressive in taking on Bloomberg and Dow Jones.
