This week we were surprised to hear the potential asking price for BusinessWeek: $1.00. At that price you could find it somewhere on the value menu of most fast food restaurants. In some ways this feels worse than just shuttering what was once the largest ad supported title in the country…it’s more like a slap in the face than a fond farewell.
BusinessWeek is faulted for coming out with a weekly by one source that says “They can’t compete as a weekly anymore because financial information is so time sensitive.” But we think this might have been said by someone who’s never read an issue of BusinessWeek. Ok, ok, neither have we. But we regularly go to the site for a wealth of information, and well, it’s certainly worth a dollar, particularly the Innovation section. Check it out while you still can for insights on how businesses and brands are growing and changing, as well as basics and updates on investing, starting a company, and real time updates of stock performances.
BusinessWeek isn’t going out of business yet, but it’s unclear what the future holds for the brand. With the shuttering of titles likely to continue, is there anything we can do? Audiences are shifting habits and getting their messages online. But does this shift in habits mean they have to kill the messenger? Right now people don’t seem to mind, but eventually when all the messengers are dead, what happens to the message?
So we’ll say it, in 30 years, there will be no newspapers or magazines, probably sooner. But people will still want content. Lest it become a tale of newstander beware, it’s time to proactively figure out how to protect these brands. It’s not that the content is irrelevant, just that the medium may be. In other words, people don’t buy magazines because they want paper, they buy them because they want content. The source still matters though and we’re wagering that people would trust information from BusinessWeek over JoeQBlog.
We’d love to see BusinessWeek tap into its brand strength and find a way through this. Perhaps there’s an issue with the name…is “Business” too vague? Is “Week” too long? Maybe they need to develop subbrands that can speak to everything they offer. Afterall, who would expect such a great Innovation section based on the name BusinessWeek? We know that people won’t be holding paper-based magazines soon and we also know that people will always want content they can trust. With that in mind, let’s hope BusinessWeek takes some insights from its own innovation section and finds a way to stick around a while longer.
These print behemoths should focus more on how they can adapt to the times. Rather than kicking and screaming about the print medium dying out they should be thinking about ways to continue to distribute their content – which is king, regardless of the medium it’s in.
The kindle is growing in popularity so why not explore a subscription-based model that would allow users to download their content right to the medium that they’re using.
I don’t think magazines newspapers will be wiped out, entirely. The act of holding something is still somthing people enjoy and I don’t think that’s going to be a dying trend, rather an increasing trend as we decrease the amount of magazines and newspapers. There have already been several new magazines that fund themselves through the support of their base. Of course, they are much smaller in scale compared to Business week, but maybe there’s an idea there to keep these business afloat. If people want you around then they’ll help out. If you’re dead…then you’re dead and you should accept it and either evolve or move out of the way for emerging and more successful products that want to make it into the marketplace.
=D
I agree…publishers urgently need to take new approaches to distributing content. And while people do like to hold things, I don’t think those things are going to be paper-based. We’re just beginning to see what’s possible with mobile data applications and in five or six years even the Kindle will look like a relic. Once the experience goes up and price goes down, the migration to digital mobile content consumption is going to skyrocket. But that doesn’t mean the titles should all fold…they just need to rethink!