Backchat - Flashback. September 2000 - We delve into our archives to find out who and what were making the headlines in our pages five years ago, a few months after Thomson had nabbed Dialog.

Dissenting view on Thomson's acquisition of Dialog.

Some commentators were staunchly behind Thomson's takeover of Dialog, but others took a more jaundiced view. Paul Blake's opinion piece, The Jury's Out, suggested it was too early to predict how things would turn out, but that "Dan Wagner has effectively thrown in the towel at Dialog, leaving that once industry-leading online service in limbo". Blake was waiting to see "whether Thomson has the appetite to re-energise it, or is merely interested in accumulating some fresh content and securing its own revenues at bargain basement prices". He suggested that Dialog had been in decline for some time: "it was overstaffed, bureaucratic and slow to implement new technology. Its sales were flat and the company was haemorrhaging money". So why did Thomson swallow it? The key was in a comment made by Dick Harrington, Thomson president and CEO. "The Dialog services cut across all our businesses. 80% of Dialog customers are in our market groups." And anyway, 35-40% of Dialog's top-line revenues already come from Thomson. "Keeping Dialog going protects Thomson revenues and provides a conduit for selling Thomson data," concluded Blake.

Grace periods for electronic journals proposed

A letter from the secretary general of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries (ASA), Rollo Turner, detailed a problem that the fledgling online subscription industry was encountering - sudden terminations of access rights on 31 December, despite subscriptions having been paid. Turner wrote: "It appears that, for a number of publishers, there is insufficient time to update the ...