Business & Financial News - Big Investments & Premium Prices

It's usually a good idea to avoid investments in products that are rapidly being commoditized.  But while the quality and quantity of "free" business and financial news continues to grow through services like Google News, Topix, Seeking Alpha, TheStreet.com, MarketWatch and others, established media and financial informaton companies continue to make huge investments to improve their news offerings.  Access to high quality news organizations are behind the News Corp bid for Dow Jones and the Thomson acquisition of Reuters.  The FT reported yesteday that Bloomberg was going to expand its reporting staff by over 200 in the coming year.  Bloomberg news editor Matt Winkler said "“News is a very important driver of the terminal business."  And recent deals in the space - the FT buying mergermarket and Dow Jones buying efinancialnews.com - indicate that news organizations can command premium prices. 
News products that command a premium have at least one of these three differentiating characteristics - it must be market-moving, idea-generating or providing a significant amount of decision support, like services for algorithmic trading.   Expect the competition for these types of services, which is already heated, to intensify over the next few years.