Regional Dailies Give Business Away

We can add still another franchise – business news – to those being abandoned by the daily press. I’ve seen slimming of business pages, some announced grandly, some never acknowledged but painfully obvious to newspaper readers. Once-robust sections of eight pages have trickled to six or four, clear candidates for newspaper hospice.

So the Orange County Register’s recent moves – in addition to a segmentation (old people: print; young people: online) approach caught my eye. The Register seems to be giving up on the local print business business: 

• Its Business Monday section was eliminated.
• It stopped publishing its stock tables.
• It folded daily business news into its main news section 

That’s indicative of what we’re seeing, usually in a more piecemeal decline, across the country, with papers as diverse as the Denver Post, Cincinnati Enquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Reno Gazette-Journal, Winston-Salem Journal, Monterey Herald and Akron Beacon-Journal announcing major cutbacks.   

It’s not surprising. The Web is so much better suited for business news in so many ways. Business is immediacy, moving faster than government – seconds, minutes, hours, days – as often compared to months and years. Business is about numbers, and instant access to interactive, automatically databases are a wonder. Take Marketwatch’s new Portfolio product, for instance, which combines current stock price, historical pricing and current news into one dynamically updated screen. 

Such innovation reminds me of the days of newspaper business innovation. I believe (Knight Ridder alums, please remind me) it was the Miami Herald that innovated the Business Monday section in the early ‘80s. The idea was a simple one: both for the readers and for the newsroom journalists – business literacy. 

Where daily newspaper had long concentrated on governmental coverage, it started dawning on people that this little phenomenon called American capitalism might be worth a look. The emergence of local and regional private sector coverage was a good thing, and over time, we even saw some journalists hired for some degree of business acumen. The comfort with numbers has never approached, though, the comfort with words in any daily newsroom I’ve ever seen, save the Wall Street Journal.

It is worth pointing to SABEW, the organization for business news editors and reporters, which has managed to keep nurturing the beleaguered trade.

(Last year I did a presentation of news business change to a group of editors at a midsize daily. One came up to me at the conclusion and offered, “That was really interesting, though I’m not sure I got it all, “I’ve never been good with statistics.'”) 

That discomfort has never been a good thing. Increasingly sophisticated readers have become increasingly frustrated with innumerate journalists and gone elsewhere, as dailies largely failed to climb the business news hill fast enough. 

So here we are in 2008 and face these realities: 

• As print papers slim, they’ll cut business news and business news reporters. It’s fine to eliminate expensive-to-print listings tables, something they should have done earlier before today’s big crunch.

•  Papers will have less call on local/regional print business advertising, further reducing those revenues. Failure to deeply cover regional business only exacerbates such ad loss, as business advertisers find the B2B and B2C ad targeting and lead generation of the web far superior to expensive, mass market print.

• On the web, the business news game is largely global and national – not local. While dailies used to be the portal of business news – local and national – for their readers, they’re not online. We’ve learned that national media – WSJ, New York Times, AP, Reuters, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, Business 2.0 and lots of specialized blogs or blog aggregators like TechCrunch, AllThingsD and SeekingAlpha are the places to go.

•  The Web business news business is lucrative. Business news – an area through which lots of money is moved – pulls in the highest CPMs out there. Take the niche of business news video – exploding on the above sites – and you see CPMs of $100 and more.  

So where does that leave local business news coverage? Most companies I think will just cutback in print and limp along online. 

We may see innovation and new business models in a couple of areas. Expect to see more partnerships between the national/global business news suppliers and local media sites. Look at what Reuters did with the International Herald Tribune a couple of months ago. IHT, owned by the New York Times, contracted with Reuters to provide both its print and online business sections. Co-branded. Revenue share. 

That’s also the approach of Dow Jones, which over the years has signed up about three dozen papers for its Sunday personal finance print product. The Register is one of those papers carrying the product, along with the Denver Post, Star Tribune and Sacramento Bee. Steve Townsley, an alum of both Newspaper Direct and New Century Network, is directing sales for the product. 

Townsley says the product, featuring per fi content from WSJ, Marketwatch and Barrons, runs two to four pages for the Sunday business section (as long as one remains!), with local publishers getting two-thirds of net ad revenue sold on the pages. Fidelity, Vanguard and T Rowe Price are among the advertisers. Again, co-branded. Revenue share. At this point, Dow Jones’ initiative is a print one, with only a pdf version web-available. 

What makes sense now is a full-throttle national/local partnership -- mainly online -- with some print products as ads merit, with Reuters, Dow Jones and Bloomberg leading contenders to move on such an opportunity. AP also has a position to play, but

I haven’t seen it get enough serious traction with business products over the years.

There is some local innovation. Just last month, Philly.com launched a 3-4 minute daily early afternoon video report, anchored by its business news blogger. Eric Grilly, who runs Philly.com, says the sponsorship (currently ING) of the five-day-a-week program should bring in about $250,000 a year. 

But for the most part, I think we’ll see the level of actual local business news reporting diminish. Sure national reporters will parachute in to follow bigger stories and businesses themselves are rapidly becoming “publishers” filling the void with “news” they generate about themselves and then merrily distribute on the web. Yes, Pfizer, Ford and Chevron are all now publishers. 

But knowledgeable local business news coverage – barely out of adolescence – seems unlikely to develop into a robust middle age.

Comments

[Wing Yu]

Keep in mind that there are a number of newspapers that are now building very robust online business sections in terms of editorial content and advertising opportunities. 8 pages of print have transformed into thousands of dynamically-generated webpages. The San Francisco Chronicle at sfgate.com and Houston Chronicle at chron.com both have the expected stock and mutual fund "tables". More importantly, their reporters continue to generate regional industry news (tech and energy, respectively) that can be syndicated to other media sites and to other financial channels through the use of RSS. Local reporters are in the trenches to uncover the local impact of national business stories like interest rate cuts, higher gas prices, foreclosures, layoffs, etc. The creation of local business news is still quite viable for those newspapers that choose to invest in it.

[Greg]

I totally agree with this, but I still find myself actually printing out an article to read. Kind of ironic...

[Mark Mathes]

Larry Birger, longtime business editor of The Miami Herald is widely credited in the early 1980s with launching the Business Monday concept so widely copied. In its heyday, 48 tab pages were common. He was later honored by the Society of American Business Writers and Editors in the late 1990s.
Media General's Tampa Tribune became the latest paper to drop its Monday Business section March 10. Its Sunday Business section was folded into the back of Commentary/editorial pages last year.
In our own 10 community papers that we publish in suburban Tampa Bay, local business news ranks in our top 3 highest read topics. Our front pages consistently have one or two local business or real estate stories every week.
Mark Mathes
Editor/publisher/owner
Community News Publications
Tampa
Ex-daily guy
New York Times Co., Tribune Company (Chicago)

[A Cassel]

You're right about the Miami Herald inaugurating Business Monday as a concept and as a standalone section. The idea came from Larry Birger, business editor at the Miami News, whose newsroom was one floor above the Herald's. Larry saw the boom in financial advertising that would follow interest-rate and stock-brokerage deregulation (national CD markets, CMA accounts, etc etc) and proposed that his own paper (owned by Cox) start a free-standing local business pub. Cox turned him down, so Larry went took his idea down the hall to KR's president, Alvah Chapman, who bought it, and him. I believe Business Monday started in 1981, under the guidance of Mike Haggerty and then Manning Pynn. (I joined the desk the following year.) It was envisioned as a tab running 32-36 pages weekly, but it quickly grew to double that size. Other KR papers followed, boosting the size of their business desks in the process.

[Allan Maurer]

The Web is the natural place for local business reporting to flourish. As a veteran of the pioneering Localbusiness.com (a casualty of the 2001 Net crash), I co-founded Localtechwire.com, which is now doing quite well with Raleigh's WRAL.com.

I'm currently reporting and editing a daily Web site, eWire and monthly print publication on Southeast tech business for www.TechJournal South.com, and we're in our 6th year.

It's impossible for dailies, even those with robust staffs and business-savvy reporters, to compete with the real-time reporting possible online. I've always managed to break major news through online outlets, beating top major dailies in major markets, not to mention the wire services, which treat most local news as trivia anyway.

My guess is that once the industry more fully transfers its marketing (ad sales) to the Web, more professional reporting will follow. If anything, local business reporting is getting better because of this, not worse.