News Corp-owned Dow Jones is in an expansion mode in India. It plans to double its investments in India in each of the next two years as it plans to expand in what it considers is a key growth market.

Dow Jones will be setting up office in Delhi, after having expanded its base in Mumbai. The headcount will jump to 70 by June-end, 70 per cent of which will be journalists.

The company has two divisions. The Enterprise Media Group consists of Newswires, Factiva, Client Solutions, Indexes and Financial Information Services. Factiva's products and services provide business news and information together with the content delivery tools that power the intelligent enterprise.

It has a collection of more than 25,000 authoritative sources includes the combination of The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires and the Associated Press, as well as Reuters Fundamentals, and D&B company profiles.

The Consumer Media Group, meanwhile, publishes the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch and the Far Eastern Economic Review.

The Wall Street Journal has received FIPB (foreign investment promotion board) permission to publish the facsimile edition in India.

In an interview with Indiantelevision.com's Ashwin Pinto, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group VP and MD Bruce Macfarlane talks about the company's growth plans in India and the facsimile edition of The Wall Street Journal which will be launched soon.

Excerpts:

What impact has the News Corp acquisition had on Dow Jones?
News Corp. has encouraged us to think big, think global and be ambitious. The mood is one of optimism and purpose. There is a fuller international focus.

What are the synergies that exist between the two companies?
We are all in the business of content and news - whether it be serving content to consumers or to business people. Global reach and experience are two synergies we have in common.

What about the synergies between newswires and news channels like Fox?
There are agreements in place between Dow Jones and other news related outlets. We have exclusives with them and we have to be careful that contracts are honoured. What is a good example though of where things happen is Sky News in Australia which is co-owned by News Limited. It has slots that regularly feature Dow Jones newswire journalists.

Across Asia which are your key markets?
China and India are key. Then we also focus on Singapore and Hong Kong. We have a business presence in virtually every market.

How do you view India as an opportunity?
India has been an 18-month work in progress. The economy has been growing very fast. The population has always been news and technology. We also see a great investor class and there is an opportunity for people to invest in India.

We can help them make informed decisions. There is a rise in Indian corporations whether it is a Tata or a Wipro. Over the last decade corporate India has become a force to reckon with.

All this creates a perfect storm where there is high demand for high quality information across a range of sectors. We see Dow Jones as being able to serve a very broad spectrum of that need.

What is the gameplan going to be to grow the business here?
Our focus here is to provide solutions that are adapted appropiately. This is very different from simply being a company that drops in international products. We understand the kind of information that is needed here - and serve that need.

Over the past few years how has the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group expanded its portfolio of products and services?
This group has been in existence for three years and we have brought several things under one banner. These are the newswire business, the index business and Factiva. Factiva was a JV with Reuters but we bought it out from them in 2006. The Enterprise Media Group also has the financial information services group. They are a very specialised high value content suite that focusses on certain markets like technology and venture capital.

We offer groups of professionals content that they can chew on through products like Private Equity Analyst and LBO Wire and also compensation studies and online databases. This section also runs events like LP Summit and PEA Outlook.

We have also made acquisitions especially in the technology arena to help us develop our solutions. For instance last year we acquired Generate. The aim was to combine Generate’s patented technology with the rich content within Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group to improve our ability to deliver pertinent, authoritative information to our B2B customer base. Generate’s content and technology was integrated across all our products.

You once said that the solutions that Dow Jones creates enables traditional market research to play its purer role. Could you elaborate on this?
Where we offer a significant advantage to our clients is that with massive information available, the challenge is to sift through all of it and find facts that matter. Dow Jones helps people reach the decision making point much faster.

The intelligence of research becomes one of analysing information directly relevant to the business. We take away the results of all the aggregation and analysis of raw data and allow organisations to focus on what matters which is applying their own intelligence to that data. Companies can look for what is relevant as opposed to simply getting all the information out there.

Do you have services for the media sector? How important is this vertical?
Our services are used broadly by media including TV channels. We also have a series of solutions that focus on the analysis of media. Corporate communications departments use Factiva for their research.

How is the challenging economic environment changing the dynamics of the business sphere you operate in?
The key difference is what I call the flight to quality. In environments such as these, businesses have to make tough budget-based decisions about what is essential and what is not. How this impacts us is that we demonstrate that we are essential to people's businesses. A lot of our clients over the past year have shown faith in our products -whether it is Factiva or newswires or indexes.

The other thing that it does is that it makes companies who are not clients think about the quality of content they are using to make business decisions. This is an environment where you simply cannot afford to make a single mistake. This means that you have to be sure that the information before you is reliable. Dow Jones reinforces the fact that quality information is important and that we are a primary provider of this information.

What value does Factiva add to market research?
What it brings to the table is two to three things. It offers a broad set of content, multilingual content. It uses best in breed technologies and so we stay ahead of corporate technology developments. What we deliver, thus, is easily integrated into people's workflow.

We also have a lot of experience in managing digital data. We collect, normalise, store and then display lots of data each month. Aggregating, managing and then displaying large volumes of data is not easy to do.

In terms of monitoring the huge volume of information and data out there you have to decide on what to track, what to filter out. How does this process work for you?
At Dow Jones we help clients filter out unwanted noise, in all media - traditional, online - and focus on the influential. It is often difficult to decide whether or not a blog on somebody's travels around Europe for instance should make it to a Factiva solution. But an influential blogger in Washington may.

We make serious judgment calls and at the same time we listen closely to what clients want and what they tell us to do. We constantly talk to clients about what is important, what is relevant, what do they want to see more from us.

At Factiva, our business is about helping businesspeople make decisions based on truly important information so that they can spend less time searching and more time analysing data.

The challenge is that earlier we only had to follow the press, trade publications. Now you also have to follow new media. We know which are the quality publications, their readerships and who are the quality journalists in traditional media. So the filtering process that we use is fairly clear, we know who we will track and follow.

Online we look at the business focussed blogs, influential writers and message boards, and we do use a degree of filtering. There are tools that help to do this. With so much information being available, it's also important to know how can you quickly spot trends, and find opportunities or threats. One of the things that we do is, we help by using a graphical interpretation of data. You may have a lot of written words, but the aggregation of those words, and their graphical interpretation, could lead to findings that are completely new.

So much information is being produced that being able to collate that, and having the tools available to layover the massive content, with a tonality, is important from a time-saving perspective. But more importantly, it is paramount from a competitive advantage perspective.