CHAPTER29The Digital Age

WHEN THE COMPUTERIZATION of news and information delivery first appeared as a speck on the distant horizon, Dow Jones moved quickly to explore and then harness it as a supplement to our newspaper-publishing business, not envisaging it as a substitute or successor business. The first major move, computerized retrieval of news and other databases, was pioneered by Bill Dunn and his colleagues. It was a brilliant success—and remains so. The second, later move, acquisition of a major global electronic supplier of real-time financial markets data, turned into a disaster.

The first steps into the digital age, taken in 1973, the introduction of a news retrieval service, were described earlier, in Chapter 22. By 1984, Dow Jones ...

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