Dow Jones Risk Journal Launches Amid Completion of Additional Acquisitions
Dow Jones launched the Dow Jones Risk Journal last month, the latest evolution of its B2B offerings that are seeing some of the best growth across the company.
The offering comes amid the completion of the company’s latest acquisitions, Dragonfly Intelligence, a geopolitical and security intelligence provider, and Oxford Analytica, a provider of geopolitical intelligence advisory services from FiscalNote Holdings, for $40 million.
Those new products complement the risk and compliance division of Dow Jones, which contains news, data, analytics and events offerings.
“We’re always looking at opportunities, anything that has proprietary data information, the opportunity to add more news in, to deepen the vertical, but we want to be doing this across the portfolio,” Emma O’Brian, senior vice president of strategy, told AMO. “It’s not just risk and compliance that we need to really invest in. We need to invest in all of them.”
“All of them” includes business news (Wall Street Journal), wealth and investing (Barron’s, Market Watch, IBD), energy (Opis, Chemical Markets Analytics). The risk and compliance division of Dow Jones grew 16% year over year in 2024 to nearly $300 million, hence the continued expansion of that portfolio, as well as the desire to replicate that success across the other verticals.
Dow Jones is building up its B2B businesses as niche audiences prove to be more attractive and lucrative than general consumer audiences. It’s also focused on proprietary information that readers might have a hard time finding elsewhere.
Watch This Space
The Risk Journal is a dashboard with a combination of original reporting from a team of 10 journalists and an aggregation of risk-related content from across the Dow Jones portfolio, including the recent acquisitions, which will continue with business as usual.
Third party contributors like law firms are also being contracted to provide deeper and more nuanced analyses of new regulations or enforcement actions, for example, Dave Pettit, managing editor of Dow Jones Risk Journal, told AMO.
The journal covers 16 topics including financial crimes, money laundering and corruption and bribery and aims to attract not just risk and compliance professionals but also a broader audience who need to know about geopolitical and supply chain risks.
“There’s a wide range of topics that are important to anybody in an organization that has responsibility for recognizing and mitigating risk,” Pettit said.
If you’re running a business unit within a company, or you’re a senior manager in a company, and you need to think about how the latest news affects where your plants are based globally, or what your supply chains are… [It’s] incredibly important for senior executives who are making strategic decisions about where they want the company to go, and that’s from two different dimensions, two different angles: One is where they want the company to go and be on on on the basis of mitigating risk, but also where they want to grow and be in terms of unlocking opportunities.
The journal is available on desktop, tablet and mobile and offers email news alerts and newsletters. A subscription costs $800 a year with a total addressable market of $10 billion and growing. Dow Jones didn’t have numbers yet to share, but said they are working with launch partners who have been giving positive feedback thus far.
Other acquisitions across categories are set to be announced in coming months.
“Watch this space,” O’Brian said. “If you look at the value stack, we want to be adding more news assets to our energy offerings. We want to be adding more proprietary data in our wealth and investing offerings. Some of that can be done organically based on the work that we already have.”
Dow Jones is also trying to connect the newsroom across beats and derive more insights for end users.
“We also are working more horizontally and in terms of collaboration across the verticals and finding new ways to serve our readers,” O’Brian said, including with news and business information database Factiva.
“Where we have opportunities with Factiva, how can that be replicated or enhanced by moving it across the business? Are there other opportunities with other data sets that we have, or other technologies that we have activated in x area that we can then move across the company and one be more efficient, but also derive insights for different answers and different customers. And that’s the homework assignment.”
