Chief Executive Lex Fenwick Out at Dow Jones

I saw something earlier about how the Wall Street Journal is getting a makeover, so I'd guess this is related. At the New York Times, "Lex Fenwick, Dow Jones Chief, Resigns in Shift by News Corp.":

Lex Fenwick, the hard-driving chief executive who stumbled in his efforts to transform Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has resigned effective immediately as the company rethinks its strategy.

The resignation was announced on Tuesday by Dow Jones’s parent company, News Corporation, which is controlled by the billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

Mr. Fenwick’s departure came after News Corporation’s leadership decided that the Dow Jones division needed to change direction, said a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

News Corporation’s chief executive, Robert Thomson, felt that the company, which was spun off from Mr. Murdoch’s more profitable film and television businesses, needed to offer more flexibility to customers, and was keen to change course quickly, this person said.

Mr. Fenwick’s plan had been to unify a number of Dow Jones products — offering a fast-moving news wire along with other financial databases — and charge customers one price for them all. The new venture, called DJX, was seen by many inside the company as a misstep, said two people, because the high-priced product offered little choice and was unpopular.

Numerous customers blanched at the price increases, and many complained that the product was inferior to the data terminals offered by Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.

“We’re reviewing the institutional strategy of Dow Jones with an eye toward changes that will deliver even more value to its customers,” Mr. Thomson said. “As part of that, we’re planning improvements to DJX.”

Mr. Fenwick, who once ran Bloomberg L.P., was with the company for less than two years. He was rumored to have set up a boxing ring in Bloomberg’s London offices to energize the sales staff. An internal company newsletter from last year described him as “The Lex-ionnaire” and pictured him, head shaved clean, wearing his trademark tailored purple suit.

He will be replaced on a temporary basis by William Lewis, News Corporation’s chief creative officer and a former editor in chief of Britain’s Telegraph newspaper group, the statement said. Mr. Lewis helped oversee News Corporation’s response to a British investigation of the phone hacking scandal in 2011.

Current and former executives who worked with Mr. Fenwick say he has a history as a gifted salesman with a record of expanding businesses. But they have also described him as a brash and demanding boss.

Nearly a dozen senior executives left the company during Mr. Fenwick’s tenure, according to a study published by the analyst Ken Doctor at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism lab.

More at Romanesko (which is the reference above, after all), "WALL STREET JOURNAL MEMO: NEWSROOM CHANGES MEAN ‘A FASTER-MOVING, DIGITAL-FIRST NEWS OPERATION’."