• by Ray Schultz , July 16, 2024

Dow Jones, publisher of the The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Investor’s Business Daily and other publications, has filed a massive breach-of-lawsuit against Cision, a PR and media-monitoring service. 

In 2023, the firms signed an eight-year deal giving Cision “exclusive rights to distribute Dow Jones Information (comprising both Dow Jones Proprietary Content and a subset of licensed content within Factiva) in the public relations and corporate communications market,” according to a draft of the complaint. 

Dow Jones was to be paid $173,624,000 over the eight-years period.

However, on June 6 of this year, Cision CEO, Cali Tran “emailed Dow Jones stating ‘[a]s discussed, the strategic partnership between our companies has not been working out as anticipated," the complaint states. "Simply, the partnership is not economically viable. To date, Cision has lost ~$6.5M on this relationship... Given these realities, Cision plans to suspend further payments to Dow Jones.”

The suit also alleges that Cision “provided unauthorized access to Globe & Mail Content for certain Canadian government entities.”

Dow Jones is demanding full payment and compliance with a severance agreement. 

The case is on file with the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, Commercial Division.