I don’t know any of the players so I don’t know the inside baseball, but the Dow Jones reorganization announced today feels like most of a right move. It puts the online and print versions of the WSJ under the same management, so all those horses have at least a chance of pulling in the same direction. The NYTimes has the same idea, combining print and online into a common newsroom. (The NYT’s locution of its "Continuous News Desk" has always bugged me though; isn’t the very nature of news continuous?)
Sticking the DJ wire in a different group, along with the stock averages and other market services, first struck me as a little odd but has a strong logic. The wire and market services are, essentially, reseller services and are available to be repackaged. Not so much the Journal or Barrons. The client bases for the newspapers and the information services are just different.
The Ottaway newspapers are an entirely different business and need their own separate management.
