On October 30, 1997, MarketWatch.com launched as CBS MarketWatch to offer stock market news and information for individual investors. Now known as MarketWatch, the site celebrated its 10-year anniversary last week. OJR spoke with its editor-in-chief, David Callaway, who joined in 1999, on the phone to talk about how financial journalism online has changed over the years. An edited transcript follows.
OJR: Walk me through MarketWatch’s milestones over the last 10 years – what the industry was like and your thoughts as editor-in-chief at each point. You joined MarketWatch in 1999. What was it like to be an online journalist back then?
Callaway: Well, back then, no one in mainstream media took online journalism seriously. In spring 1999, a radio host asked me on the air if I could think of anything lower on the food chain than an online journalist. No one is looking down their noses at the Web anymore. I believe it’s the biggest change the world has adopted – first by the readers and then by the media.
OJR: What prompted you to leave Bloomberg for MarketWatch?
Callaway: The excitement of building something in the online world. I was fascinated by the Internet, and MarketWatch was a new company. It had been up-and-running for two years before I joined. Things were very primitive. We had a very primitive webpage – in fact Microsoft had developed the platform for running yearbooks. I think at the time we had 20-25 journalists. We have about 100 today.
But our biggest goals back then are essentially what the biggest goals are now: to level the playing field. We aim to recreate the experience created by Reuters and Bloomberg for free on the Web. We try to move at the same speed as the people on Wall Street.
We are four times the size now, but every day we compete with those same competitors. Those are the companies that break news on a global basis, 24 hours a day.
OJR: In 2001, MarketWatch was one of the first websites to install an introductory message ad unit with Budweiser campaign. Why did you do that?
Callaway: We were very nervous because we thought readers would hate it. We talked a lot about how long we’d allow them to run. Back then, a couple magazine sites were doing them, some entertainment sites. Now everyone is doing them.
OJR: In 2003, MarketWatch acquired VirtualStockExchange.com, an online trading game site.
Callaway: Right, it was a website put together by college students. We used it to build out the community aspect of MarketWatch so that our readers would not only read the news but also be part of the action. It was a unique thing. It had plenty of online games not too different from fantasy football or baseball. CNBC also had big online games section, actually even bigger than VirtualStockExchange. We got a respectable amount of traffic on it.
OJR: In 2004, MarketWatch partnered with Thomson Financial to license your financial news content for institutional use.
Callaway: 2004 was a big one for us. MarketWatch originally catered to a retail crowd – it was started for small, active investors – individuals who couldn’t afford big news services. Thomson didn’t have a news service, so they came to us and asked us to create one. It doubled the size of the news operation. Thomson was running Dow Jones; they lost Reuters, and they wanted to have more than one news service.
OJR: In 2005, MarketWatch was acquired by Dow Jones.
Callaway: A huge event. It’s worked really well in the last three years. Dow Jones is a 100-year-old, preeminent company for sophisticated investors and folks on Wall Street. They wanted our readership.
Dow Jones now has the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones news wires, Barron’s, and us. Among the four, MarketWatch is closest to Dow Jones news wires – the editorial team focuses on real time news. But we work very closely with them. We appear on their site, and they appear on ours. Within the empire of Dow Jones, we maintain enough editorial independence to keep our readers happy, while helping them with their product.
OJR: And of course, in 2007, Dow Jones and News Corp. announced their merger.
Callaway: It’s not yet closed so I can’t say much about it because I honestly don’t know what will happen.
About Jean Yung
