Splitting HairsWhy the Weekender was allowed to fail |
Better marketing and distribution would have helped, but there is an alternative....
EAST LONDON - Theories abound as to why The Weekender, the BDFM paper shut last week to genuine sadness from columnists as diverse as David Bullard, Justice Malala and Tim Cohen, was never given a fair shake.
BDFM - which is a joint venture between Sunday Times publisher Avusa (JSE:AVU) and Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times - seem to have stacked the odds against the paper succeeding from the very beginning by not bothering to market it much and by allowing Avusa to put up its feet when it came to distribution.
Of course, it could just be shambolic management on BDFM and Avusa's part but in media circles there have been mutterings about Avusa viewing The Weekender as competition to the Sunday Times to BDFM wishing to clear the decks for the Financial Times Weekender edition delivered to subscribers in South Africa over the weekend and even to talk of an Avusa Saturday title.
Not discounting corporate politics - and the politics between Avusa and BDFM are frosty - the woeful fact is that launching a Saturday paper was always going to be a tough sell.
Traditionally, Sunday has been the stronghold of the weekend market in terms of ad spend and circulation. There is more time on Sunday to peruse a paper than on Saturday and newspaper consumers are used to expecting a meatier read on the Sabbath day.
The ABC circulation figures for weekend papers shows that Saturday papers across the board have taken a tumble this year. Ironically, The Weekender was actually showing a modest growth in circulation (13 995 sales in the first quarter of this year compared with 12 643 in the previous comparable period) but that was too little, too late for the BDFM board.
What could have been done to save it? Sure, better marketing and distribution would have helped but ultimately it is very hard to launch newspapers these days. Aside from Naspers' (JSE:NPN) Daily Sun, the first real tabloid to explode into the South African media scene, all new titles have struggled.
It's far easier to launch a news website because the costs are far lower and this year has been distinguished in South Africa by the start-up of three online-only sites that may go somewhere, Michael Trapido's Richmark Sentinel, Duncan McLeod's TechCentral and Branko Brkic's The Daily Maverick.
I do wonder whether the big cheeses in BDFM management are ignorant of a major trend in the US this year that has seen countless newspapers from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat to the Kansas City Kansan and the Tucson Citizen go online only because they could not sustain themselves financially as print publications.
Whether it's an innovative idea or a last resort remains to be seen but recently the highly respected US-based Christian Science Monitor reported that in the seven months since it scaled back from a daily newspaper to a weekly magazine and beefed up its internet offering that its website's page views were up by 20% and unique users had risen by a higher percentage. As for its weekly print magazine, 93% of the 43 000 subscribers switched to the new format and sales had increased to 67 000.
The other interesting case study is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which was one of two daily newspapers in Seattle until it went online only in March after it posted a loss of $14m in 2008. It cut back staff and now relies quite a bit on about 200 unpaid bloggers for content. Its owners, Hearst, will not say whether the site - which has morphed into a sort of a home page for Seattle - is making money but that it has kept most of the traffic it had as a newspaper website and that revenue is ahead of projections.
Is this the way of the future? To be liberated from the increasingly high costs of the printing and distribution of newspapers is mighty tempting but there have also been spectacular failures, most notably the Finnish daily newspaper, Taloussanomat, which went online only at the end of 2007 because of falling readership and heavy losses. After an initial rise in traffic, Taloussanomat's unique users were 22% lower and pages impressions were 11% down after five months.
A study by the City University London's Graduate School of Journalism in April found that Taloussanomat's costs fell by 52% when it ditched the print publication but its revenue fell by at least 75% due to the loss of print advertising and newspaper subscriptions.
The study also found that for newspapers that went online only, there was an increase of more sensational/celebrity stories and a shift away from original reporting to news agencies because of the demand to update websites often. It was only worth dropping a print edition and going completely online, the study concluded, if the newspaper had an operating loss of 31% or greater.
The Weekender already has a handful of staff, a network of freelancers and a website so I'd say taking it online only is worth a stab. Make it paid for - something cheap like R30 subscription a month and throw in e-mail newsletters daily (or twice a week) to give subscribers a teaser of the main headlines. It would be low cost and, because people must subscribe, you can get demographic information on them so you can sell targeted advertising. I wouldn't update it on Saturdays as internet traffic in South Africa is very low over the weekends - but through the week.
If you get just 5 000 people to cough up R30 a month, that's R150 000 a month - R1.8m for the year. That would pretty much cover the costs although freelance stories would have to be scaled back from what the print edition was taking but then there's the additional advertising revenue.
I'd pay R30 a month for The Weekender online. Peter Bruce, The Weekender's editor-in chief (and editor of Business Day), did not want to be drawn on whether he had ever or was considering such a course but it is unlikely he could sell such an idea to BDFM's management. They have not distinguished themselves as innovative online thinkers. What a damn shame.
*Media columnist Gill Moodie spent 14 years as a salaried hack in print media in South Africa and the UK before escaping to the blogosphere and freelance journalism. She is the publisher of Grubstreet http://grubstreet.co.za/ in between unpacking and packing the infernal dishwasher and bringing up a four-year-old with attitude.
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