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Technology at Dow Jones & Co. has come a long way since I started at the Wall Street Journal in 1979. Back then, copy from reporters arrived on clattering Teletype machines. Copy editors marked up paper with pencils, rewrote paragraphs on manual typewriters, used rulers to tear out sections of copy, and then taped everything back together. Clog-prone conveyor belts carried copy around the newsroom. Noisy—and equally clog-prone—pneumatic tubes transported articles between floors. A graduate student from China who spent a few weeks on the copy desk wrote in a term paper for the Columbia School of Journalism that Dow Jones was “a leader in backwardness.” No more. Dow Jones not only has updated how its editors and reporters operate but also has become a pioneer in online publishing, demonstrating that subscribers are willing to pay for at least certain kinds of information. To explore the future of news in an online world, I returned to my old haunts to interview Peter Kann, who has been chief executive of Dow Jones since 1991. It’s always fun to talk to Kann. I still remember the first time I met him, 20 years ago, when he visited the Wall Street Journal Chicago bureau. With two dozen of us gathered in the conference room awaiting the arrival of several august personages from New York, Kann walked in, tossed his suit jacket on the floor, sat down cross-legged on a table, and regaled us with stories of being a war correspondent in Asia. In our recent conversation [“Extra! Extra!”], Kann described the new demands that customers are making on Dow Jones, because they can communicate so much more easily these days. He talked about new styles of newsgathering that harness the ideas and energy of readers and provide easy links online to documents and other additional information. Kann warned, though, that “instant communication doesn’t necessarily make for better thinking.” Several other pieces in this issue show how, as with Dow Jones, technology can be used to produce major improvements in a business. “Something Ventured, Something Gained” draws on Motorola Inc.’s considerable experience in investing in technology. The column explains how companies can find opportunities for growth by making small investments in start-up ventures. “Biller App” shows that many companies are producing significant savings by taking advantage of the fact that electronic bill presentment and payment is finally taking off. “The Friendlier Skies” lays out how airlines are using technology to do everything from speeding up check-in to losing fewer bags. Not that passengers won’t still have complaints. The biggest caution in this issue comes in “Sick Sigma?” a feature about the incredible spread of the process-improvement management tool called Six Sigma. While the piece says Six Sigma does a great job of eliminating defects, it also cites critics who warn that the tool is being applied much too broadly. They say, for instance, that companies will fail if they try to use Six Sigma to produce innovations. “The Seven Myths of Knowledge Management” provides a warning: that companies will waste their money if they fall for any one of the seven commonly held misconceptions. “Round 2.0” cautions that companies need to stay alert. “Dot-coms did not generate a new economy, they did not rewrite the rules of business, life as we know it did not end,” writes Andy Lippman, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. But “the challenge is not gone. It is just beginning.” As we would have said in an earlier age of publishing, “Read all about it!” Cheers, Paul B. Carroll |
