Daily papers battle for dominance

Setting up a new publication or relaunching an existing one can be a testing experience. Differentiating on the level of increased sports pages or more insightful business coverage is no longer the easy way to increased circulation and readership.

Every publication either has the basics in place or can gain access to them very easily so the basis for differentiation has to lie in the combinations and the mix of these variables.

The one constant in this equation is the reader and this factor is gaining more power and leverage with the increase in publications available across the South African spectrum.

A segment of the spectrum that is immediate and therefore accessible to constant analysis is the morning newspaper market. It is a part of the market that is often overlooked by marketers, PR and advertisers and yet it reaches many people via the papers themselves, as well as headlines on lampposts, and is flaunted through the traffic by hawkers.

The Citizen has recently added a more extensive business section during the week as well as a media and marketing section on Saturdays to combat The Saturday Star.

The Star has tried upgrading sport both qualitatively and quantitatively as well as increasing the number of regular columnists.

The Business Day has niche readership that doesn't really compete with these papers for readers although it is no longer the sole provider of in depth business news and analysis.

The Sowetan remains almost unchanged with a core readership and the Daily Sun has found the basic and previously uncatered for working man segment of the market.

This Day was launched recently amidst much hype and aimed straight at the upper levels of readership amongst businesspeople and intellectuals.

The obvious immediate target is The Star but The Citizen could lose some readership if This Day can maintain better and more relevant editorial. Add to this the in-depth news coverage as opposed to the scattergun approach providing vast quantities of superficial news.

What makes this debate even more interesting is that the target reader of This Day does not exist currently as a stand-alone market segment. The interesting question that is going to plague and perplex marketing people both at the paper and outside their offices is whether the reader exists and if so, just what makes this reader tick both on their own as well as in a pack.

If there is a viable market of intellectuals, business people and other readers that need and demand in-depth insight in their daily reading then this publication will fly. It will however need some tweaking and polishing so that it can evolve into a stayer.

No venture be it in business, media or science ever stays the distance in exactly the format and combination or mix of building blocks with which it first ventured off the drawing board. Some readers may argue that only small changes are necessary but the point is that those are critical as the devil is always in the details.

Daily newspapers have to be more attentive to competitors and more aware of their own target market than weeklies and monthlies as the turnaround, both positive and negative, can hit that much faster.

The most important beneficiaries of this day-to-day combat are the readers and the more discerning of them will decide the battles. The long-term success of This Day need not necessarily mean the demise of other dailies but rather an increase in the amount of morning newspaper readers.