Spectator Business: Champagne editorial — but the publisher is drinking something different

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 9 May 2008 at 12:58
Tags: Press Holdings

Andrew Neil has been celebrating the success of Spectator Business. Apparently, the first edition attracted £75,000-worth of advertising — off the back of a “free” circulation of 42,000.

Who are the lucky 42,000?

I had a good look around, but The Spectator’s web site seems to be silent on the matter. Likewise that bit of the site reserved for Spectator Business.

But here comes Media Week, with the suggestion that 12,000 copies will be distributed to, er, people travelling first-class on Eurostar and staying in five-star hotels in London.

Bulks, in other words. Mysteriously, a further 30,000 will be sent out to “targeted customers”.

Who they? Beats me.

Could some of them be drawn from The Spectator’s subscriber base? Possibly, but if that’s the case, advertisers might start opting for cheap pages in Spectator Business (rather than expensive ones in Spectator proper).

Cannibalization isn’t pleasant. And perhaps this explains why Spectator Business has been so indistinct about its circulation strategy.

Of course, it’s never been the done thing to look too closely at the circulations of British business magazines. Even so, Neil’s efforts to sustain upmarket products off the back of weak circulation arguments strike a bum note.

Demented circulation wheezes were a speciality of [The/Sunday] Business, which itself went through more incarnations than the Dalai Lama.

Now, apparently, Spectator Business has inherited some of the same genes.

But if this spin-off starts out with a flimsy circulation, the aim — presumably — is to sign up lots of honest-to-goodness subscribers, and quickly.

(Or is it? Having just visited the Spectator Business web site, I find I can’t subscribe online. All it would take is a little bit of HTML and a Google Checkout account, but no — Instead, I need to call Axis Media Ltd on 0141 335 9062. Like lots of potential subscribers, I suspect, I’ve postponed doing this. Probably indefinitely.)

But let’s assume that Spectator Business has a run of luck with subscribers. Let’s assume — generously — that it manages to accrue 10,000+ of them.

What then? A good deal more will be needed to credibly challenge the market leader — Haymarket’s Management Today, which has been plugging away successfully for 40 years.

MT distributes over 50% of its 100,000 circulation for free, but tops up that number by sending copies to 42,000 members of the otherwise unremarkable Institute of Management.

For years, it’s been MT’s link with the Institute’s self-selected audience — plus some excellent content — that has allowed it to trounce competitors with that big six-figure circulation.

Will Spectator Business’s small audience of foyer flaneurs and Eurostar commuters trump Haymarket’s bigger, more controlled, reach?

In the eyes of media planners who treat business magazines as an optional add-on to schedules, I doubt it.

Andrew Neil’s continuing quest to launch a worthwhile business magazine in Britain is becoming painful to watch.

As the livewire editor of a tumescent Sunday Times between 1983 and 1994, Neil did as much as anyone to condition us to consume vast amounts of newsprint every weekend — and ignore magazines.

Surely, by now, the man has already done enough to atone for his sins?

As for Martin Vander Weyer, the excellent editor of Spectator Business, everyone knows that he is capable of generating champagne for the business brain.

Sadly, his publisher’s circulation strategy seems to be running on Irn-Bru.

ACAP: More reactions

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 3 December 2007 at 14:32
Tags: Daily Mail & General Trust, Guardian Media Group, Independent News & Media, Media, News Corp, News International, Telegraph Media Group, Trinity Mirror

Interesting to see that News International has become the first UK publisher to implement ACAP. Absent cooperation from the search engine industry, it’s not quite clear what ACAP v.1.0 actually involves. Here’s Oliver Luft at Journalism.co.uk:

Developers claim that at first not all web crawlers will be able to read the new system, therefore modifying an existing system is the simplest form of implementation.However, using this approach a further modification to ensure specific permissions are understood by web crawling technologies will be required at a later stage.

. . . At this point, it’s not exactly clear whether News International intends this as little more than a gesture. That seems to be the way in which Dominic Young, director of editorial services at News International, frames it.

Search engine guru Danny Sullivan offers up a critique at Search Engine Land. As always, Sullivan’s stuff is worth reading.

Sullivan asks: “What does ACAP provide that robots.txt and meta robots does not? After going through the technical specs, which are pretty dense reading, I’d summarize it this way:

• Emphasis on both granting permissions and blocking
• Support for time-based inclusion or exclusion”

Head over to Martin Belam’s blog Currybet for a critical discussion of ACAP. Belam, who waves the flag for a DRM-free web, is not impressed:

It seems like a weak electronic online DRM - with the vague promise that in the future more ’stuff’ will be published, precisely because you can do less with it.

Belam is a techie. He’s only scratching the surface of ACAP, but already seems to be finding hints of trouble with its technical implementation. My guess is that he will be the first of many.

I wonder whether Ian Douglas’s views on ACAP are representative of official policy at The Telegraph Group. I don’t think he’d have written about ACAP in this way if they weren’t.

Douglas is skeptical. He writes:

The very idea of exclusion is ridiculous to any publisher with an advertising-based model that relies on traffic to pay the bills.

That’s a sensible objection. As it transpires, Telegraph Media Group is not among the members of ACAP. Nor is Guardian Media Group, Trinity Mirror or Daily Mail & General Trust.

The list of members includes Express Newspapers, News International and Independent News & Media.

Historically, Wapping has never liked search engines. The company’s lawyers have lobbied the EU aggressively on the subject. And it’s probably logical to take Anne Spackman’s views as evidence of wider concern.

Aside from that, it’s worth noting that ACAP’s leading proponents within the UK newspaper industry are two of the weaker players. . .

More seriously, there’s a serious lack of involvement from the US newspaper industry.

Google is more internationalist than many other technology companies. But it won’t have failed to notice that The Associated Press is the only representative from North America’s news industry on ACAP’s list of members.

Times vs. Telegraph: The war of Brown’s recession

Posted by Peter Kirwan on 30 November 2007 at 13:58
Tags: Media, News International, Telegraph Media Group

When it comes to the prospects for recession, the whitetop business sections are polarizing rapidly.

At the Telegraph, Ambose Evans-Pritchard appears to be wandering around wearing a sandwich board engraved with the words: “End Of The World Is Nigh”.

By the looks of it, Evans-Pritchard has written his message in copperplate outline and then coloured in the individual characters.

No, more than that. He has painstakingly cross-hatched them, like this.

The problem with Evans-Pritchard is his wide eyes. It’s all just a bit too breathless. Jeff Randall, of course, is a bit different. But even he is talking about a looming social catastrophe driven by household debt.

Meanwhile, the headlines at the Telegraph’s business section headlines include the following: “US economy grinds to a halt” and “Black day for UK economy”. There’s a definite line being enforced here.

And at the Times?

Anatole Kaletsky, economics correspondent, suggests that we ignore the stock market’s impersonation of a whore’s drawers. (Sorry, that’s twice in one week we’ve used that expression.)

All will be well, Kaletsky suggests, because the broader economy is “protected by self-stabilising mechanisms that are much more powerful than the reflexive boom-bust behaviour of financial markets”.

On top of that, here’s business editor James Harding — the man himself — suggesting that we’re in danger of talking down the housing market. Relax, he suggests, it’s just a correction. Not a crash. Really.

Oh, and we loved this bit: “The US economy has a mysterious ability to right itself, particularly in a presidential election year. . . ”

The dichotomy between the Telegraph and the Times is striking. In Victoria, they’ll soon want credit for calling the biggest recession since the 1920s.

At Wapping, there’s a curious sense of civic duty on the City desk. They’re doing what they can to talk down the prospects of a recession. Gordon Brown and Mervyn King will no doubt be grateful.

The FT, since you ask, is heavily inclined toward bearish at the moment. Then again, its perspective is global (ie: US-centric).