In this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, we hear from Emma O’Brian, SVP Strategy for Dow Jones. Everyone knows Dow Jones – or at least a few parts of its portfolio, even if they don’t know it as part of the greater organisation. But as the company moves from a portfolio-based business to a vertical-oriented publishing and information one, how is that impacting its back room strategy, and how it seeks new acquisitions?
The company is more than simply the index that bears its name, as our guest this week makes clear right from the off. However, much of what underpins its success is the same focus on providing tangible insights to audiences, as and when they need it. Increasingly, its stable of publications under the Dow Jones Portfolio – including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, and many more – are just as integral to their audiences as the index is to stockbrokers and traders. It seeks to deliver relevant information to its audiences, no matter where they may be.
In this episode, the final of this season, Emma sets out how a change in strategy that occurred when Almar Latour came into the role ultimately changed how those publications are aligned and operated behind the scenes.
Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
The backroom aspects of acquisitions
It’s no surprise that in some of these tech portfolio companies, you’ve got 100 different CMS’s, you’ve got 20 different platforms, all these different services. That’s before you’re even thinking about new acquisitions. There can be dozens of different operating systems, so you can’t even take the best of what’s working in another business or another workflow if you don’t have a synchronized system across all of your businesses.
Just from that perspective, we’re working on that back-end platform so that we can all share the best practices, technologically-speaking and beyond.
Then, when we’re looking at acquisitions and when we’re thinking about our growth strategy… because we’re working on this platform approach, anything that we bring in might come in via a discussion around or a specific strategy around enhancing a vertical or one of our businesses. But it also has to be something that we can incubate and move across the entire portfolio.
Using internal marketing to pull together
We have consistent messaging from the top down, and then also from from the bottom up and even horizontally. We have our goals, we have our targets, we have the North Star, and we repeat it again and again and again.
Being able to show and tell examples of where [a strategy] has borne out is really part of the thing. We’ve built out our communications team to be really dynamic in this way: they’re in every meeting. They’re in every conversation, because there’s a consistency of message that needs to happen internally and externally. And that’s that that we’ve found to be very powerful.
Then there are cross-business initiatives that we want to make sure people understand… Talent, operations, products, everything needs to be swimming in the same direction.
The old is the new
There are a lot of changes that we’re going to see in the coming years. Even if we start thinking about the election and the retrenchment of news organisations, to really thinking about the growth strategy, it was clear that so much of our audiences, or our desired audiences, were getting news on platforms like Tiktok and Instagram and even other platforms that are not in the same breath.
So it’s probably no surprise that that very visual audience really needs good news, and needs good journalism. And so the old pivot to video that 10-15 years ago became a joke… I think it’s back in a different way. Maybe it’s dressed up, and we have to be back in vertical video…this has got to be much more dynamic and much more friendly for those different platforms.
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