First signs of a quality backlash?
Jinfo Blog

7th March 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Juggling ever increasing demands with static or declining budgets, information managers are well used to making the most of free information. But one FreePint survey last year found a trade-off between using free sources and the time taken in finding and vetting them (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e20979) – and another showed that, while they continued to rely on free resources, information managers were also focusing more on measuring the value of the content they offered (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e25236). Given this scenario, it was probably only going to be a question of time before an established business information provider weighed in with hard evidence on why relying on free information could be a high risk strategy. In Pay Now or Pay Later, Dow Jones offered some telling arguments to show that free information could prove costly to any knowledge-driven enterprise (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24127). Now there’s evidence that that publishers are starting to drive home the quality message even harder. The Financial Times, for example, sees a ‘flight to quality’ in its recent 3% readership rise, as reported by the National Readership Survey (http://digbig.com/5bbekg) – and Dow Jones crowed recently that it had been an hour ahead of the competition in reporting recent debt developments in Dubai, beating both Reuters and Bloomberg who each cited Dow Jones in their own reports (http://www.dowjones.com/pressroom.asp and follow links to 5 March release). Quality also figures in a new survey from the Columbia Journalism Review, with some alarming implications. According to Magazines and their Web Sites, 40% of the anonymous respondents admitted that fact checking was less rigorous on their web versions than in print, with no fact checking at all on the online version in 17% of cases. Now admittedly the survey covered consumer magazines rather than business-to-business. But one finding that should make information managers sit up is the 54% of respondents who acknowledged that, when corrections were made, there was no indication to readers that a mistake had been there in the first place (http://digbig.com/5bbekh). Faced with an expert and well informed readership, it’s reasonable to expect business-to-business publishers to do better. But in B2B, other commercial imperatives may be driving events. It’s difficult to know how much credence to lend to suggestions in the blog-based online ‘scandal sheet’ Gawker.com that journalists on leading financial news wires are living in a ‘climate of fear’ over pressure to break ever more scoops – leading in some cases to allegations of stories being misrepresented as exclusives (http://digbig.com/5bbekk). But, with increasing pressure on paid information providers to demonstrate what differentiates them from the myriad of free sources, information managers will need to be even more vigilant in distinguishing between real quality and its illusion.

« Blog