• by Erik Sass , September 16, 2015

Publishers are partnering with social media platforms to boost distribution and reach new audiences. The trend is now expanding to include more business news and information. 

That is the upshot of several new partnerships between big business info providers and Symphony, a social network targeting the wheelers and dealers of Wall Street.

Symphony, backed by Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and BNY Mellon, among others, soft launched two years ago as a social network for bankers and traders incorporating instant messaging, Twitter, chat forums and internal feeds from big companies.

According to the New York Post’s report at the time, it was backed by a total of 15 banks that together invested $66 million in the network, which serves as a standalone company.

In addition to letting the wolves of Wall Street talk about clever ways to make money, Symphony was also intended as a way for banks to reduce their reliance on Bloomberg’s messaging and data terminals, which cost $1,850 per year per user. Now the social net is making good on its promise through partnerships with McGraw Hill Financial, Dow Jones and Selerity, the company that scooped Twitter on its own financial results by picking them up off its investor relations page in April.

The publishers will provide a range of business news and information, including McGraw Hill Financial’s S&P Capital IT service,and Dow Jones’s complete live news feed, numbering thousands of stories at any one time, for $15 a month -- an order of magnitude cheaper than Bloomberg’s service.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether the quality of the content matches Bloomberg’s. Even if it doesn’t, this may be sufficient for many bankers and asset managers. The network has already built a trial user base of around 30,000 financial professionals.

The Symphony partnership appears to be an attempt to resurrect Dow Jones’ business newswires product following the failure of DJX, which was positioned as an alternative to Bloomberg’s widely used subscription-based financial information service.

Many speculated that the lackluster performance of DJX contributed to Lex Fenwick’s departure as CEO of Dow Jones in January 2014, to be replaced by William Lewis, a News Corp. executive from Britain.