The Times: strong family resemblance

Because this new daily is a dead ringer for its all-South African grandpa and in spite of the alarming rate of infant mortality that has afflicted the daily newspaper business in this country in recent years, this newcomer has the best chance of survival if only because it has been born with a silver spoon in its mouth.

And much to the consternation of all those people who phoned me to ask if I intended being as scathing about The Times as I was about ThisDay and Nova, this new venture is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Misguided sperm

Nova was born out of what could only have been a drunken evening of debauchery which resulted in an unwanted pregnancy and ended up being born simply because no-one thought of having an abortion. It was a failure from the time that completely misguided sperm hit its reticent and completely unprepared ovary.

ThisDay never had a hope in hell from the first day because its management regarded marketing as optional and opted not to market it at all. In fact, it took quite some time after it was born for the ad industry to actually realise that a new daily was on the streets. The paper appointed a paltry eight advertising reps who had no chance whatsoever of competing against the 350 employed by the SAC alone, not to mention a few thousand others flogging newspaper and magazine advertising space.

As the MD of The Media Shop, Harry Herber, put it, "ThisDay was never even on our radar screen.”

Instant market

So why is The Times any different? Well first of all, unlike Nova, ThisDay and hosts of other daily failures, The Times was not born without a subscriber base , no sales and no readers. The Times has the enormous advantage of going to 120 000 subscribers on day one. All of whom are identifiable, by name, gender and street address.

And that, in publishing terms, is pure gold.

Something else The Times has done right is not to try and become something entirely new and different. The Sunday Times DNA runs through its daily version very strongly indeed, so all those existing Sunday Times subscribers will know exactly what they are getting.

Of course, there have surposingly been a few that have said that they don't want it but that's probably because they are naturally suspicious and reckon they're going to get an extra bill for it. Which they won't.

Trouble is the publishers were reticent about putting the word "Free" on it anywhere which would have solved the problem. I'm not altogether sure why they were worried about the word because the biggest growth sector in newspapers today is in free sheets.

Of course, everything now depends on advertising revenue – especially when producing a newspaper with no cover price. Normally a very risky business.

Ad boom will help

The Times has arrived during the latter stages of the advertising boom, so it is fairly likely that at least some media buyers will work on the assumption that it is actually being read by those who are getting it for nothing without having been asked.

Other advertisers will no doubt wait for the first readership research to come out and then either react positively or walk away.

But, at least the publishers did not make the mistake of filling the first issue with free advertising for big brand clients of the Sunday Times in order to give the impression that advertisers were flocking to it in droves.

There aren't too many ads in this first issue but that's to be expected. Frankly given Johncom's pitiful record at selling advertising for new products I would have considered it nothing short of miraculous had The Times appeared with a lot of advertising.

Crisp layout

Editorial content is typically Sunday Times. It's very readable and the layout [provided at great cost by an overseas expert], is very crisp and neat. Of course, with the content smacking so much of Sunday Times, it is going to be interesting to see whether editor Ray Hartley and his team can get their mindsets out of the luxury of weekly mode and into the daily grind of coming up with the goods every 24 hours.

The Times represents an interesting experiment by Johncom. Giving it away free to existing weekly subscribers is a mixture of high risk and pure genius. Risky because history shows consumers don't actually appreciate getting something of value for nothing.

So, in my opinion, Johncom is going to have to hang in there and produce good enough editorial content for those 120 000 Sunday Times subscribers to get used to reading a paper once a day instead of once a week.

That's something readership research has never shown – just how many readers of weekend papers do so precisely because they don't have the time to read anything of substance during the week. That's going to be something of a kicker in this case.

Sustainability

Time will tell whether The Times will be sustainable. And there is no reason why it shouldn't be if Johncom continues to support the editorial team with all the resources they need and also if it doesn't let up on the marketing effort.

Because, even though they are getting the new daily to their 120 000 subscribers, the really big trick is to keep persuading them that they should actually read the thing and not just use it to line the bottom of their parrot cages.

So once again, in spite of silver spoons and deep pockets, it all comes down to marketing. Hopefully by now, the Sunday Times management has realised that unlike their counterparts at the ill-feted ThisDay, marketing in this competitive age, is not an optional extra but essential.