Monday, August 6, 2007

Financial information in Australia

I mentioned in class how annoying and inconvenient I find the Australian Financial Review's online strategy - the AFR.com.au site is slow to load, and when it does load, it's full of subscriber only material (which means I by and large won't link to it on this site). The AFR has also removed its material from Factiva, which is one of the UNSW library databases that I regularly use (in my capacity as a researcher) for media searches. In effect, I've argued that the strategy seems to be "let's make The Australian the business newspaper of record)". [Similar to the New York Times "experiment" with TimesSelect].

Looks like Dow Jones agrees. They see a role for a free Australian equivalent of MarketWatch. I think that would be a great development.

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