# Factiva > Dow Jones's premium news and business research database — 32,000+ licensed sources across 200 countries and 28 languages, with deep archives and company intelligence. **Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/factiva **Official site:** https://www.dowjones.com/professional/factiva/ **Category:** newsgathering **Also covers:** verification ## Security rating - **Rating:** adequate - **Rating note (required when citing):** Factiva runs on Dow Jones enterprise infrastructure with encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access, and standard logging. There is no public record of a major Factiva breach. The platform has not publicly disclosed SOC 2 Type II status, and pricing opacity makes it difficult for individual researchers to negotiate data handling terms. The bigger trust consideration is corporate: Factiva is owned by News Corp, which means search queries flow through Murdoch-controlled infrastructure. Rating reflects standard enterprise security with a meaningful corporate-conflict caveat for journalists covering News Corp or Murdoch family interests. - **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — not an independent security audit - **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-07 > AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment. ## Who it is for Business and investigative journalists, financial reporters, M&A and competitive-intelligence researchers, corporate communications teams, and academic libraries that need licensed full-text access to global business news and company filings. ## Editorial take Factiva is the closest direct competitor to LexisNexis Nexis, and the two products split the professional news-research market. Factiva's edge is business and financial journalism. It aggregates 32,000+ licensed sources including The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, Reuters, AP, Dow Jones Newswires, the Financial Times archive, and trade publications across 200 countries in 28 languages. More than 600 newswires update continuously. Company snapshots pull executives, financials, ownership, and competitor lists from Dow Jones data partners. The platform pays publishers royalties for licensed content — a meaningful distinction from scraping-based news search. Smart Summaries, launched in the redesigned interface, runs generative AI over the content library to produce natural-language answers from cited articles. The classic Boolean search remains for power users who need precise queries. The strengths are content depth and licensing clarity. For business investigations, M&A backgrounding, executive history, or tracing how a story developed across the financial press over decades, Factiva is the standard. WSJ archive access alone justifies the subscription for many business desks. The weaknesses are pricing and access. Dow Jones publishes no list prices. Individual seats run $400+/month, enterprise contracts run into five and six figures annually, and there is no freelancer-friendly tier comparable to ExpertAccess for Nexis. The interface, while improved, still rewards trained researchers over casual users. Coverage of non-business news is competent but thinner than Nexis. Ownership matters. Factiva is wholly owned by Dow Jones & Company, which is owned by News Corp — Rupert Murdoch's media holding company. Journalists covering News Corp properties, conservative media, or Murdoch family business should know that their search queries flow through infrastructure owned by the subject. There is no public evidence Dow Jones surfaces individual user queries to News Corp editorial, but the corporate relationship is worth noting for sensitive reporting. For business and financial journalism, Factiva is essential. For general investigative work, Nexis usually wins on breadth of public records. Many large newsrooms subscribe to both. ## Best for / not for **Best for:** Business and financial investigations, M&A research, executive backgrounding, tracing coverage of companies across decades of WSJ and trade press, monitoring global business news in multiple languages, due diligence on private and public companies, and accessing Dow Jones Newswires and Reuters archives in one place. **Not for:** Freelancers and small newsrooms without enterprise budgets — there is no affordable individual tier. Real-time social media monitoring. Deep US public records work (Nexis Accurint is stronger here). Journalists covering News Corp or Murdoch family business who want their research queries to live outside Murdoch-owned infrastructure. ## Pricing - **Pricing:** Opaque enterprise pricing — Dow Jones does not publish list rates. Press Gazette reported individual subscriptions around $432/month. Vendr data shows enterprise contracts negotiated by seat count, content packages, and term length. Most newsroom and corporate buyers go through annual contracts. Academic access is bundled into ProQuest library subscriptions. - **Free option:** no ## Security & privacy details - **Encryption in transit:** yes - **Encryption at rest:** yes - **Data jurisdiction:** United States. Dow Jones & Company is headquartered in New York City. News Corp is incorporated in Delaware. Factiva infrastructure runs on Dow Jones-managed cloud systems. **Privacy policy TL;DR:** Dow Jones collects account data, search queries, documents accessed, and usage analytics. Enterprise customers can negotiate data handling and retention terms in their contracts. The Dow Jones privacy policy permits sharing within News Corp affiliates for business purposes. Factiva does not publicly disclose SOC 2 Type II certification status. Search history persists in user accounts unless cleared. **Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):** Use a dedicated work email for your Factiva account, not a personal address. Enable multi-factor authentication if your institution offers single sign-on. Clear search history and saved searches periodically. Do not save sensitive source names or investigation targets in saved-search alerts. If you are reporting on News Corp, Dow Jones, or Murdoch family business, run your most sensitive queries through a different research database. For institutional accounts, ask your administrator about data retention terms in the contract and whether queries are logged at the seat level. Treat Factiva search activity as discoverable by your employer in any internal review. ## Ownership & business - **Owner:** Dow Jones & Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp (NASDAQ: NWSA, NWS). News Corp is controlled by the Murdoch family through the Murdoch Family Trust. Factiva began in 1999 as a Reuters–Dow Jones joint venture; Dow Jones bought out Reuters in 2006, and News Corp acquired Dow Jones in 2007. - **Funding model:** Subsidiary of a publicly traded media conglomerate. News Corp reported $9.6 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue. Dow Jones is News Corp's largest and most profitable segment. Factiva is one of Dow Jones's enterprise products alongside Dow Jones Risk & Compliance and Dow Jones Newswires. - **Business model:** Enterprise SaaS subscriptions, per-seat licensing, and API access. Revenue from financial institutions, law firms, corporations, newsrooms, government agencies, and academic libraries. Factiva pays royalties to licensed publishers — a contractual revenue model rather than a scraping or fair-use model. Approximately 900,000 users globally. **Known issues:** Pricing opacity: Dow Jones publishes no standard pricing for Factiva. Costs are negotiated individually and vary widely by seat count, content packages, and contract term. This favors institutional buyers and excludes most independent journalists. News Corp ownership: Factiva is owned by News Corp, controlled by the Murdoch family. There is no public evidence of editorial interference with research queries, but the corporate relationship creates a conflict for journalists investigating News Corp properties, Murdoch family business, or Dow Jones itself. Search activity flows through Murdoch-owned infrastructure. No freelancer tier: Unlike Nexis, which has the ExpertAccess.org program at $26/month for journalists, Factiva offers no comparable individual access path. Independent reporters generally cannot afford it. Interface learning curve: The redesigned Factiva interface and Smart Summaries improve discoverability, but power users still need Boolean syntax and field operators to get the most out of the platform. Casual users often miss relevant content because their queries are too broad or too narrow. Coverage gaps: Factiva is strongest in business and financial news. Coverage of local US news, court records, and public records is thinner than Nexis. Many investigative newsrooms subscribe to both products to cover the gaps. No public SOC 2 disclosure: Dow Jones maintains enterprise security controls but does not publicly disclose SOC 2 Type II certification status. Enterprise customers must request compliance documentation through sales. --- Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/factiva Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology