Dow Jones NewsPlus Goes Live

Dow Jones Newswires last week launched a live feed of Dow Jones NewsPlus, the first of several XML-enabled news services that display major stories in a browser environment. The service has already begun to attract users, including Los Angeles-based brokerage and money management firm Crowell Weedon.

Dow Jones NewsPlus provides market moving stories as selected by Dow Jones editors, along with popular items such as analysis and commentary; earnings data and charts; columns including Market Talk; and links to key content by sector, topic, etc. Users can search the entire newswire by keyword or ticker symbol. Searches go back 30 days or 1,000 stories.

Officials say the service highlights the most valuable content.

"People love our content but have trouble finding the stuff most valuable to them," says Paul Ingrassia, president. He describes the release as the biggest development since the newswire moved from broad tape to electronic delivery.

Stories are updated continuously between 7 am and 6 pm. Posting is delayed by five minutes or less for editors to choose which stories to post, write a blurb and input links, says Bob Prinsky, senior editor for product development. As a result of that delay--and because only selected stories are available--Dow Jones Newswires does not expect the product to replace scrolling news services.

Dow Jones NewsPlus is available for free to Dow Jones News Service subscribers. Currently it cannot be customized, but officials say that capability will likely be added in future versions.

Andrew Crowell, COO of Crowell Weedon, which is currently rolling out Dow Jones NewsPlus, says one of the biggest improvements is the elimination of the retrieval codes. Instead, users access stories by clicking on hyperlinks.

"You have a Dow Jones Web page with point and click retrieval," he says. "You don’t have to remember difficult codes and acronyms."

Crowell adds that the service also narrows down the amount of information that Dow Jones provides. "It becomes difficult to navigate the wide body of Dow Jones news and information," he says.

Crowell Weedon will roll out Dow Jones NewsPlus over Thomson Workstation to all 175 financial advisors within the next two weeks. Crowell says many financial advisors are using it to replace online news sources such as CBSMarketWatch and MSNBC.

Currently, Thomson Financial is the only vendor carrying Dow Jones NewsPlus. The service is available over Thomson Workstations and all Thomson One packages. There are about 200,000 users on those platforms, according to Thomson, with approximately 160,000 of those on Thomson Workstation.

Lou Eccleston, president of Thomson Financial’s Banking and Brokerage group, notes that users can link between Dow Jones NewsPlus and Thomson data and applications. For example, a story might have a link to a real-time chart. A user can click on a point on the chart to access the news stories for that day.

"A lot of other news providers try to do it just with menus. Dow Jones has leapfrogged that with a nice navigation and interface into a lot of news," Eccleston says.

Other vendors due to offer access shortly include Agencia Estado, Communicator, NewsWare and Wall Street Source. Dow Jones Newswires can also integrate the service into internal sites.

The company is currently developing a similar service aimed at international equities users in Europe. Due out next fall, it will be bundled with Financial Wire, Dow Jones Newswires’ premium international equities service.

A third version dubbed Money, is being developed for the fixed income and foreign exchange markets. Third parties may contribute analytics and data, Ingrassia says.

The service is based on the wallstreetinteractive.com infrastructure. Using existing technology reduced costs and helped to allow Dow Jones to offer the service for no additional cost.