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After 10 years, it's still all about the markets
Commentary: MarketWatch begins 2nd decade as news, not content, provider
By David Callaway, MarketWatch
Last Update: 10:03 AM ET Oct 30, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Content is king. Long live the king.
Actually, that well-worn phrase, in and out of popularity more than half a dozen times since MarketWatch was launched 10 years ago today, is misleading. Content isn't king. News is king. And at MarketWatch that means market news.
"Content" is a horrible word, snagged from the bowels of the dictionary by the same Internet marketing folks who gave you "B2B," "hard stop" and "digital solutions." Its primary definition is something that is contained, such as the contents of a bag of dog food, or the contents of a bottle of valium. Or the contents of your retirement account. News is the last thing that can be contained -- especially online news.
News is columnist Herb Greenberg blogging and delivering audio reports from the burning suburbs of San Diego as the fires approached his neighborhood last week. News is European senior correspondent Aude Lagorce calling in Airbus headlines from the Paris Air Show between video newscasts for MarketWatch and the rest of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network. News is markets writer Myra Picache sending bulletins as oil hits $90 a barrel while writing a column on what this means for gasoline prices, due in 30 minutes. News is New York bureau chief Greg Morcroft directing Merrill Lynch coverage while rewriting the story at 7 in the morning. Almost 100 journalists make news happen several hundred times a day at MarketWatch, and several hundred thousand people a day come to us to get it.
These people sweat blood for their craft. To call their writing and video efforts simply "content" is the digital equivalent of calling a newspaper fish wrap.
Now, I've been laughed out of enough meetings and dinner conversations to know that I'm not going to change the world on this news-versus-content issue. The word content, like "wiki," "waterboarding" and "Britney" -- all forms of torture -- is in the lexicon to stay.
But as MarketWatch looks back this week on its first 10 years of coverage, and looks ahead to what might develop in the next 10 years, the only thing certain is that there will be news.
From Day 1, we positioned ourselves to be a primary provider of news, not just to the Web site but to media partners such as CBS, the Financial Times, Yahoo, AOL, the Knight-Ridder Tribune syndicate, even the New York Daily News. Once we were acquired by Dow Jones & Co. in 2004, we began providing news to Dow Jones Newswires, Barron's Online, WSJ.com and The Wall Street Journal itself. Dow Jones gave us a reach into the institutional world we hadn't had before and helped us hone our identity as the primary place for real-time coverage of stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies and derivatives, as well as personal-finance-focused investments such as mutual funds and ETFs.
Now, with News Corp. acquiring Dow Jones, we stand ready to provide news to any and all of its global media operations.
Ten years on, the market for free online financial news is a very crowded place. No longer is it just MarketWatch, TheStreet.com and the Motley Fool. Reuters and Bloomberg are coming on strong, the Associated Press has beefed up its business coverage, and newspaper sites are getting better everyday.
But there are still only a few, and perhaps no others of our size, whose primary audience is on the Web and who do news themselves, in all forms, from print to video to audio.
More will come. As newspapers shrink their staffs, and get better online, the news organizations of the next five or 10 years will increasingly take this format. It will be looked back upon as a period of transition, but also of enormous opportunity for journalists capable of change, especially in financial news.
The great thing about covering the financial markets is that trading is always going on somewhere. And where prices are moving, there are stories to tell. The news organization that can keep up with the pace and add real context to stories, as well as forward-looking analysis, will win the day every time, and the readers will vote with their feet -- er, eyeballs.
In the past 10 years, we've seen at least two major asset bubbles, one and perhaps two recessions, a half a dozen global financial crises and, of course, a seemingly never-ending fascination with tech stocks. It has been not only our pleasure but our continuing ambition to serve you with our coverage. And we hope to see you for another 10 years.
When I joined MarketWatch in 1999, I was interviewed by a popular San Francisco radio host. His first question to me was, "David, is there anything lower on the media food chain than a Web journalist?"
Perhaps a fair question, at the time. But now he writes for us.
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