Surely even the recession can’t explain the depressing state of the newsweekly. Like many news publications, BusinessWeek has struggled as advertisers in its core categories of finance, technology and automobiles have curtailed advertising. But look back further and data suggests that its advertising has declined for seven of the last eight years, although its circulation has held steady.
A media agency executive made an interesting comment on this recently, suggesting that many publishers still made the outdated assumption that if you build the audience, the advertising dollars will come. As BusinessWeek is proving, this is no longer a guarantee.
Clearly, BusinessWeek’s pain runs deep. And as our Off The Fence piece this issue shows, for any potential buyer willing to assume the burden of turning around the business, there will be some difficult decisions to make. It would need to scale back print operations, build out the web offer, and push further into business lines not so reliant on advertising and subscription sales. Hardly an easy fix by any means.
So, a sale is likely to be difficult - even with a price so low that no financing is required for a powerful brand that’s been successful in previous years.
Part of the problem is that would-be suitors, other business publications, aren’t doing much better. They all have their own challenges with existing titles, and taking on the publication’s red ink wouldn’t be wise.
Even so, for all the huge sums of money BusinessWeek is said to be losing, its token dollar sale would be devastating - a vote of very little confidence for the category.
Indeed, while there may have been specific circumstances that helped BusinessWeek slide into the red, all business media are facing the same challenge. Even with an economic recovery, the pre-recessionary ad dollars aren’t coming back to print.
For proof, look at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ five-year outlook for the media and entertainment industry, which shows that adspend will not return to the peak levels of 2007. Moreover, by 2013, the only media channels expected to be up significantly from 2009 levels will be online. The predicted decline is in part due to media fragmentation and decreased demand.
The fact is, marketers have more options for reaching consumers than they previously had, many of them far cheaper. They are increasingly orientating their spending towards channels that are relevant, interactive and accountable. And so business brands have been investing online in major ways, albeit with varying results, for some time.
The business media’s fight for survival may yet see more casualities. But the brands that will be best placed to survive this crisis will undoubtedly be those that have already recognised the need to be pivoting towards new revenue streams beyond print.
Got a view?
Email Atifa.silk@media.asia
