As banks, insurers, mortgage companies and hedge funds crater, financial publishers and data providers, not to mention their investors, are bracing for the hit. The last downturn and the pain that it caused, between roughly 2001 and 2003, lives in recent memory.

Whatever uncertainty exists about the crisis, it's clear this time it's worse.

"The market at this time is kind of incomparable," says Larry Tabb, founder and chief executive of research and strategic advisory firm Tabb Group LLC. "All of the vendors across the sector are going to take hits," says Tabb, who formerly managed business analysis for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s trading services division and oversaw testing and implementation of its systems.

"When you have three of the top five brokers being acquired or going out of business or both, then you have the whole fixed-income and credit-market side of virtually every bank melting down, it's going to impact folks who provide these services and products."

The industry has been reshaped since the last bloodbath. Bloomberg LP surpassed Reuters as the largest financial data company, then the newly merged Thomson Reuters Corp. overtook Bloomberg. Dow Jones & Co. is now an outpost of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Many of the companies have rebuilt themselves to better withstand crunches. There is a movement away from advertising revenue and toward long-term contracts and subscriptions. As news becomes a commodity, information providers aim to burrow into customers' businesses with services that help them comply with regulations, automate systems and draw users into communities. Some expanded operations in other professional industries that buffer their financial exposure.

"It might not be a whole lot of fun to manage through a period like this," Thomson Reuters CEO Thomas Glocer said in an October presentation. "It's the strong companies that come through periods like this and get stronger."

It is difficult to imagine a contingency plan that could account for the destruction on Wall Street and beyond. The meltdown will put new business models to the test. Companies that have already tightened belts may have to consider deeper changes. Deals from the Thomson Reuters merger to Murdoch's purchase of the Journal will be scrutinized. Buyout firms that have built portfolios integrating publishing, data and events have to weigh their models and assumptions. The ratings agencies, criticized for their treatment of subprime securities, will draw more fire from investors and from Washington. And, while surviving the crisis, these outlets have to chronicle what is going wrong.

Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg have come to dominate financial publishing and data. At the close of 2007, before the merger closed, Reuters had 22.32% of the financial data marketplace, excluding ratings companies, according to Inside Market Data. Thomson had 9.95%. Bloomberg's share was 32.73%. The next largest were Interactive Data Corp., controlled by Pearson plc, with 4.47%, and FactSet Research Systems Inc., with 2.92%.

The top companies were constructed differently. Thomson Reuters was forged through a $17.5 billion merger that joined financial information with tax, science and healthcare holdings. Bloomberg, with its ubiquitous data terminals, has favored internal expansion.

The April merger of Reuters and Thomson combined two companies with different profiles and exposure to finance. Before the deal, Reuters almost wholly relied upon the sector. Now it resides among Thomson's platforms in other professions.

Arguably, it makes those units stronger by providing news and information to subscribers in other fields.

By comparison, Thomson's financial segment accounted for 30% of pre-merger sales. Today the markets division accounts for 59% of revenue and about 45% of its profits.

During an October investors day in London, Glocer acknowledged there will be pain. But he added that the company's geographical diversity and operations outside of finance will buoy it until a recovery. "No matter what the news is day to day here, the idea that there won't be a very important global intermediated finance business is absurd," he said.

He forecast a return to the "banking giants of the 1980s," with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. stepping to the fore.

The U.S. legal business will be "fantastic for the next several years as everyone sues the hell out of each other" and bankruptcy practices expand, Glocer said. The CEO wished he could "retool some of the [collateralized debt obligations] traders and retrain them into bankruptcy lawyers overnight."

Thomson Reuters markets group chief Devin Wenig said, "[In] the previous bust in 2002, it was very difficult to point out any part of the business that was growing." Today, however, he said demand exists for products that help institutions understand balance sheets, growth in the Middle East and Asia and a booming foreign exchange business as investors search the globe for security.

During the previous downturn, head count reductions among financial firms particularly hit Reuters. The company has since emphasized data feeds that stream information into companies' systems and are less dependent on staffing levels than terminals. Data feeds are also more amenable to automation, which financial firms are promoting.

"Roughly half the group profits of Thomson Reuters comes from financial markets. It's bound to come under some stress next year," says Alex de Groot of WestLB Panmure Ltd. "However, to some extent it's a market leader, so therefore it may be that some smaller competitors get marginalized first."

It's more difficult to gauge privately held Bloomberg's risk. Bloomberg has geographic diversity. But it has greater exposure to finance than Thomson Reuters, and terminals dominate its sales.

"Bloomberg will certainly get hit, and they might get hit a little harder than Reuters," Tabb says. "Their marquee product has been on the fixed-income side or the credit side of the business, whereas Thomson Reuters has been less known as a fixed-income-type product," he says. Its clientele includes many hedge funds and investment managers, another market that's suffering.

Lehman was a big account. Bankruptcy court filings show Bloomberg sold about $80 million in services to Lehman in 2007. On the other hand, the firm's contracts with Merrill Lynch & Co. may have some protection. As part of Bloomberg's July deal to purchase a 20% stake held by Merrill for $4.5 million, thefirm reportedly agreed to spend more on terminals regardless of a sale.

Bloomberg may also be a victim of its recent success. "Bloomberg has steadily been selling and installing more terminals than their main competitor, Reuters, even in the dark times of 2001 to 2003," one industry source says. "If eyeballs literally are removed from the game, it is most likely that those eyeballs were looking at a Bloomberg screen."

Arguably the most jarring of the developments was Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones and an already-shrunken Wall Street Journal.

For all its editorial prestige, Dow Jones did not enjoy great success in financial data and systems. The company bought data provider Telerate Inc. for $1.6 billion in the 1980s, for instance, and sold it in the late 1990s for $510 million. Dow Jones lost more than $1 billion, or roughly one-fifth of what Murdoch paid for the whole company.

"I do think of [Dow Jones] much more as a specialized news provider than as a provider of dealing systems," says David Worlock, chief research fellow at Outsell Inc. "What does The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times do about this? Obviously, they will hold up because their news support is fine and in high demand in rapid-news-breaking times," he says.

"But news in general is commoditizing, and we're not very selective about where we get it."

FT publisher Pearson significantly reduced its newspaper holdings in recent years, something that Thomson did a decade ago. It has also put money into education, which accounts for about two-thirds of its revenue.

Pearson's financial information arm is still a material part of its business. In addition to the FT and related products, Pearson owns more than 60% of Interactive Data Corp. The Bedford, Mass., company provides data for trading, valuation and other processes and produced about $690 million in 2007 revenue.

"It's a stable growth story," West LB Panmure's de Groot says of IDC. "Over the last five or 10 years, it has grown pretty predictably and reliably. That includes the hiatus period of '01 and '02, when markets were also under duress."

There are other players, such as FactSet Research, Wolters Kluwer NV and Informa plc, which this year rejected a buyout offer from a consortium led by Providence Equity Partners Ltd.

There are several private equity-owned providers. Investcorp, for example, backs SourceMedia Inc. of New York, which owns American Banker, The Bond Buyer, Investment Dealers' Digest, National Mortgage News and other publications.

"It is clear that what is going on now in terms of a cycle is going to radically change the landscape in a more dramatic form than what happened in 2001," SourceMedia CEO James Malkin says. "At the peak of the subprime boom in 2006, there were at least 150 active subprime lenders in America," he says. At the end of the second quarter, based on funding volumes, he estimates there were "potentially nine."

He adds: "The flip side of that is in times like this content consumption increases." American Banker Web visitors picked up 40% in September, and page views were up 30%. In addition to restructuring its editorial departments, SourceMedia is trying to capitalize on the interest in topics such as regulation and compliance through its editorial coverage, events and other means.

The finance world is waiting to see what rules Washington creates once the bleeding stops. There may be opportunity for publishers and data companies that can help investors, regulators, lawyers, bankers and others grapple with regulations.

Andrew Lipman of Bingham McCutchen LLP's Washington office says Sarbanes-Oxley provides a good analogy. In the aftermath, new and existing companies produced newsletters and other content geared toward SOX.

"If nothing else," he says, "after this crisis nobody's going to slough off the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Federal Housing Administration and the FDIC as backwater agencies."

The government will certainly look at the credit agencies that gave solid ratings to troubled residential mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a report on Fitch Ratings, Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's in July. The SEC said the firms did not always document the steps and participants in the ratings process.

The report also questioned potential conflicts among the agencies, which are paid by the companies they rate. It cited messages between analysts at an unnamed firm. "One analyst expressed concern that her firm's model did not capture 'half' of the deal's risk but that 'it could be structured by cows and we would rate it.' "

Michael Alcamo of New York business publishing and information boutique M.C. Alcamo & Co. suggests competing agencies such as Egan-Jones Ratings Co. could benefit. "It's clear more than ever that what the capital markets need is a way to value these securities without any conflict of interest whatsoever that might hypothetically arise from issuers paying fees to ratings agencies," he says.

Egan-Jones is compensated by subscribers rather than the issuers it rates. Founding principal Sean Egan says the firm had ratings on companies such as American International Group Inc. and Lehman that were several notches lower than its peers ahead of their respective blowups.

"It's unreasonable to assume that with the chaos in the financial markets that you won't see some significant actions taken to curtail the activities of the traditional ratings firms," he says.

How much publishers and information companies can benefit from changes in Washington and whether revenue offsets losses in other areas are impossible to gauge. Nor is it clear what the banking industry will look like and what banks will be allowed to do. One question is whether, ultimately, subscribers at disappearing institutions move to other firms or leave the industry.

"We're moving into more and more structural change in our industry," says Outsell's Worlock. "A down cycle simply speeds up structural change."

In difficult times, subscription revenue subsides more slowly than advertising revenue. After a recession, Worlock does not expect significant damage done to a big company like Thomson Reuters.

"I don't see catastrophe there," says Worlock. "You will look around and see an awful lot of advertising-based business models have taken a real thumping here."