Business Day should regard single edition as opportunity, not failure

As editor Peter Bruce pointed out somewhat cynically and simplistically in his column yesterday: "It will mean we cannot always bring you the closing prices of the capital markets in New York."

Who needs news?

Frankly, I don't think readers have been remotely interested in getting the closing prices of the capital markets in New York from Business Day because I would imagine every single one of them not only has access to the Internet but uses that and radio to get all their up-to-date information.

Which in turn probably means that readers of the late edition were actually more interested in reading whatever was in the first edition anyway.

So, if indeed a newspaper editor wants to stop the presses on a first edition somewhere round about midnight to make sure breaking news at the time will be covered, it is more than likely that it will be on the early morning radio news or pinging alarm messages on Blackberries long before newspapers readers have even got out of bed and trudged to the front gate to pick up the morning paper. If it has arrived on time.

New focus

So, adding all of this up, there is no question in my mind that Business Day has done the right thing and apart from saving itself R1 million a year, this move might focus the powers that be on what the primary objective of a business newspaper should be in this day and age.

The big problem with newspapers today is that they still stick to that old-fashioned and now obsolete prefix "news" when describing themselves. Perhaps coming up with another description for those things that go thump on our driveways every morning would help put things into modern perspective.

Surprisingly, Bruce only mentioned the Internet once in his rather depressing column yesterday and that was in the context of competition rather than opportunity.

Starry-eyed

Sure, the Internet has not turned out to be anything like the money-spinner all those newspapers thought it would be when they went online with such fanfare and starry-eyed anticipation a few years ago.

And the reason for this is simple - they all just took their newspapers and bunged an on online version on the net. With the result that someone like me who is in business reads four newspapers a day and only one of them is made out of paper. So at least three newspapers aren't getting my money anymore.

Now, I know that the answer is not easy. I know that revenue generation via the net is not nearly as easy as it was for other mass media before the Internet stuck its oar in. But, the survival and prosperity of great newspapers such as Business Day, lies with the net, like it or not.

What readers want

But, what newspapers have to do is start thinking, many of them for the first time, about what they are doing in terms of providing breaking news, analysis, opinion and useable information. Start thinking about what their customers want and how they want it delivered. What they are prepared to pay for and what they perceive as added value to what they are already paying for.

Unfortunately like most mass media, newspaper cannot rely on readership research because it is inherently inaccurate. Especially business media. Readers all tell researchers that the first thing they read is the stock exchange page but they're only saying that because they're too embarrassed to say they are buying a newspaper to read the letters to the editor page or, in the case of non-business newspapers, who was shagging who.

It's not about websites

The interesting thing about the Internet is that the secret of success in terms of revenue generation isn't at all about websites. It's about added value to websites - something most newspapers haven't quite got the hang of yet.

I do not believe business newspapers are dead. But, I do believe that what the consumer expects from them has changed. And a major part of this new expectation is the obsolescence of the word "news".