Deals and Developments: SPEAKING OF WICKS…

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2004 by Jeff Bercovici

Byline: Jeff Bercovici

The Wicks deal amounts to about 10 times the unit's pro forma EBITDA of roughly $9 million last year. (The deal involves a payment of $85 million, plus the unit's working capital and a possible performance bonus of $5 million.)

Dow Jones saw the acquisition as a way to expand its coverage of nonpublic companies, says senior vice president L. Gordon Crovitz, who is also president of electronic publishing. "An increasing number of our customers are interested in alternative investments - venture capital and private equity," says Crovitz. Although Dow Jones already owns newsletters in these areas (last year it bought Technologic Partners, publisher of venture-capital newsletters), the addition of Alternative Investor adds extra dimensions, he says.

Alternative Investor is a collection of three properties acquired by Wicks. In September 2001, Wicks acquired Asset Alternatives, a newsletter and conference business, from Steven Galante. A year later, it bought VentureOne from Reuters Group PLC, following that with the acquisition of another database company, Venture Reporter, this past April.