Financial news publisher Dow Jones & Co. said Wednesday it is eliminating 98 jobs as it restructures a unit focused on providing news and information to businesses.
The changes came after Dow Jones, which also publishes The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and other publications, bought the other half of the Factiva news database that it didn’t already own from Reuters Group PLC.
Under the new structure, Factiva will be combined into a new group with Dow Jones Newswires and a licensing services business.
Clare Hart, who oversees all of Dow Jones’ business-focused media and information units, will also take charge of the newly restructured unit that includes Factiva and Dow Jones Newswires.
Dow Jones’ Enterprise Media Group also includes a group of stock market indicators including the Dow Jones industrial average, reprints and a financial information services unit. The group employs about 2,200 people, while Dow Jones employs about 7,500 workers overall.
Of the 98 jobs being cut from the Enterprise Media Group, which included management roles, 62 were layoffs while the rest were open positions, Hart said. Twenty-one of the 62 positions were union jobs.
“Nobody likes to see a colleague walk out the door,” Hart said, but emphasized that the cuts were “a small number” that involved eliminating redundancies.
Dow Jones announced in October it would buy Reuters’ 50 percent stake in Factiva for $160 million. Factiva was founded in 1999 as a joint venture to combine the data retrieval and archival businesses of Dow Jones in North America and Reuters in Europe and Asia.
Both Dow Jones Indexes and Reprints and Dow Jones Financial Information Services will continue with their same structures and leadership but will collaborate with Dow Jones Content Technology Solutions on new products and services.