Clare Hart's path to the top of business information and data provider Factiva began in 1983 when she joined Factiva's eventual parent company Dow Jones & Co. as a programmer and analyst in the business information company's applications development department.

Since then, Hart has been a player and a part of the information industry's move from dedicated data feeds to Web-based desktop news feeds.

Her work with Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones newswires, includes senior management positions in Dow Jones Interactive Publishing. She was also instrumental in helping the financial information empire unveil its own Web-based distribution systems.

Before she was named to her current position with Factiva, which is jointly-owned by business information rivals Reuters Group and Dow Jones, Hart also worked as a vice president and director of global sales for Factiva.

The experience meant she supported both Dow Jones and Reuters business products at the same time, an experience that probably helped her add some diplomatic skills to her resume.

Hart, who earned a finance and computer systems degree from Drexel University and an MBA from Rider University, recently discussed Factiva's mission with atNewYork.

Q: How is Factiva different from content aggregation plays like ScreamingMedia or iSyndicate? What exactly is Factiva marketing?

Factiva offers over 8000 sources, many of which are full-text cover-to-cover. It is the only place where one can access the complement of Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters Newswires, The Associated Press and The Financial time - in one search or tracking folder. All current sources are universally indexed using Factiva Intelligent Indexing - 300,000 public and private company codes, 1500 industry, subject, geographic and government codes. News and information that is delivered via our integration product suite is wrapped in an XML wrapper making it easier to transport from one application to another. We are marketing a quality news and information service that delivers precisely the content a user or group of users requires, when they need it, in their format - ready-to-use destination service, intranet, Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

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Q: The brutal advertising market has forced a trend for online content plays to shift away from offering free content online. While this trend helps a company like Factiva, doesn't it kill the concept of the Internet as a source of free information?

There is plenty of free information on the Internet and some of it is quite good. However, much of it is scattered across several Web sites and some is inaccurate and not kept up-to-date. It has been estimated that a minute of an employee's time is worth roughly $1.71. If an employee can find precisely the information needed to make an informed business decision in 5 minutes compared to an hour on the Web, that is a lot of money saved for a company.

Factiva embraces the free Web and offers a web crawling service, which allows us to combine content from the best - as defined by Factiva's editorial staff - "free" news and information Web sites with the commercial quality content we contract with publishers to deliver through Factiva services. In some cases, the free content sites are indexed and the keyword index is run through Factiva's Intelligent Indexing process, which allows us to add value to the free Web content and co-mingle the results of the free Web with the results of the "for fee" content.

Q: Even with this trend towards the pay-for-content model, Web information remains mostly free. Have you found it difficult to implement the Factiva business model under these circumstances?

As mentioned before, the differentiating factors between free Web information and our content are Factiva's value-added initiatives. We ensure equality and timely content that is precisely organized using Factiva's intelligent indexing to enable our customers to make smarter and faster business decisions. In addition, Factiva also allows each organization to customize and integrate content into any corporate computing environment to support its unique needs.

In this economic environment, buyers want to partner and/or purchase services from companies with sound business models and a proven track record. Factiva has both. We are a privately held company, owned by Dow Jones & The Reuters Group, and we have numerous case studies from our customer base of over 1.5 million subscribers that illustrate the value of Factiva's products and services that we deliver to organizations. This value may be in the area of competitor or business intelligence, sales wins, clearer marketing direction or simply a more complete knowledge management or corporate information sharing system.