Now this is how you do a premium B2B web strategy. Lloyd’s List, the shipping news journal that’s been publishing for three centuries, is unveiling Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a high-end data service that offers info on 120,000 vessels, 163,000 shipping companies and 17,000 credit reports.

The Informa-owned List already operates a £1,400-a-year web subscription with daily news, but the new service will let readers move “from the top news stories of the day to the data sets that define underpin them”, according to the pitch. Unclear how much a subscription costs, but subs can be taken out only for individual channel areas of the new site.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence will make over two million amendments a year to the hefty database, CEO Fotini Liontou tells InPublishing - thanks to journalists, marine analysts and satellite intelligence, including from ORBCOMM.

The publisher already had much of the data at its Lloyds MIU site - the big change is linking it to the editorial content.

InPublishing: “Users are given the opportunity to ask Lloyd’s List Intelligence analysts to conduct investigations, analyse trends, evaluate demand, make forecasts, or simply get advice.”

Wikipedia: “(Lloyd’s List has) provided weekly shipping news in London as early as 1734. Known simply as ‘The List’, Lloyd’s List was begun by Edward Lloyd, the proprietor of Lloyd’s Coffee House in the City of London and founder of East India and Peninsular Navigation Company, today known as Unimarine Container Lines, as a reliable but terse source of information for the merchants’ agents and insurance underwriters who met regularly in his establishment in Lombard Street to negotiate insurance coverage for trading vessels.”