Video verification and business intelligence provider Storyful is being integrated into Dow Jones, 13 years after its acquisition by their joint parent company News Corp.
Dow Jones chief executive Almar Latour told Press Gazette the addition of Storyful on 29 June would be a “meaningful accelerator on our path to making Dow Jones bigger”.
He said it would help the publisher in its current mission to “going deeper, going wider and connecting things”.
These three ways of “building out” Dow Jones, he said, will help it get to an EBITDA profit goal of $1bn within five years, up from $588m in 2025.
Storyful was founded in Ireland in 2010 and acquired by News Corp in 2013 for around £15m (€18m/$25m) but has since operated as a standalone business. Dow Jones flagship brand The Wall Street Journal was already a customer at the time of the takeover and continues to use Storyful for sourcing, authenticating and licensing user-generated content.
Storyful operates a social media newswire for eyewitness videos that have been verified by journalists, used by other publishers including Gannett and ABC News.
It also now has a risk and reputation intelligence business in sectors including financial services, healthcare, technology platforms, energy and consumer retail.
Dow Jones has a risk and compliance business that helps large corporations navigate regulatory and geopolitical risk and runs business information business Dow Jones Energy.
The intention is that Dow Jones and Storyful will now be able to share expertise, data and tech infrastructure, helping each other scale.
Latour said Storyful would also bring a “start-up energy, a start-up mentality… as Dow Jones grows larger, we have to give conscious thought to how we keep it light and focused and agile and and able to experiment and run fast, and those are all things that Maria, the CEO of Storyful, has developed so well”.
Storyful CEO Maria Pacheco will continue to lead the brand, reporting to Dow Jones Risk general manager and EVP Joel Lange. She will also advise on various growth initiatives across Dow Jones.
Dow Jones CEO: ‘Why this is the moment to unify with Storyful’
Latour said growth at Dow Jones will come by going deeper, “meaning adding more great journalism, adding more proprietary data that you can only get from us, adding more convening and events that are of global impact, or within an industry of global impact”.
It will also go wider, by adding new content areas, and connect things by “bringing everything that we have together in the form of data, in the form of our sales efforts, in the form of how we can communicate with customers and listen to their challenges and help come up with solutions”.
He said this plan explains “why this is the moment to unify with Storyful”, especially when looking at the risk businesses.
“One part that we are going to augment strongly in the area of risk is reputational risk. Storyful brings to us a very deep understanding of how companies’ reputations are perceived on the open web, on social, et cetera and this is increasingly in 2026 something that Dow Jones customers are grappling with and are asking us about, and it is something that in-house under the News Corp umbrella was already being focused on by Storyful.
“Under the Dow Jones banner we can now scale one key aspect of what Storyful has been doing so well, bringing that insight, their analytics, their ability to verify what’s true and what’s not true on social and beyond, and we can now do that in a way to help scale Dow Jones, and also, by the way, Storyful.”
Latour said the verified video side of Storyful also fits “into the risk rubric” because it is about “managing risk for newsrooms. You are making sure that the material that you’re dealing with is verified, is real.”
He added: “News underpins everything that Dow Jones does, even as we are doing news, data, analytics and convening power. News underscores everything.”
Latour described a journey of “building out Dow Jones to be something new”.
He pointed to the 2024 acquisition of AI-powered fuel pricing solutions business A2i Systems to operate within Dow Jones Energy, but added it “also brings a technology that all of Dow Jones can benefit from”.
He also cited the upcoming launch of a business of sports vertical “starting with a large global event, and so that’s another lane in which we are covering an industry, offering news, offering data, offering analytics, offering convening power”.
Storyful boss: Clients should expect ‘increased intelligence offerings’ and ‘faster innovation’
Pacheco told Press Gazette both Dow Jones and Storyful are “focused on providing premium business intelligence, and that’s hugely important in today’s age of AI, where there’s so many signals coming from everywhere.
“And so moving under Dow Jones really just creates a much closer operational and strategic alignment, and it allows us to just have greater ability to scale and accelerate as quickly as possible, and bring together new innovation… bring together as many datasets and signals that can support our business clients as possible, and I think together Storyful and Dow Jones will be able to do that very well.”
Pacheco said Storyful will be able to invest in its verification technology and make the most of “opportunities to expand how verified content and visual intelligence are integrated into risk workflows, so not just in newsrooms but also in business environments”.
Pacheco said Storyful and Dow Jones clients should expect “increased intelligence offerings and deeper integrations and faster innovation” in the coming months.
“And then really the ultimate goal of bringing the two businesses together is we believe that by joining up Storyful and Dow Jones’ combined trusted journalism, verification or premium data, our real time narrative analysis will be able to help our clients and cover more relevant signals to their business and uncover them faster.”
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