Inside the Weekly's Winning Playbook

By Jonathan Higuera
March 4, 2008 04:10 PM

While business sections at many daily newspapers continue to face shrinking newsholes, slumping ad revenues and circulation and staff cutbacks, weekly business journals are enjoying a noticeably different story, one with solid gains in both circulation and ad revenue.

And so the question comes to mind, “Should daily newspapers take a closer look at the weekly’s playbook to see if they can borrow any strategies?”

If they did, they would find publications that clearly understand who their audience is: business-oriented readers who want to be informed of any news that will affect the business climate.

There’s hardly any of the psychosis daily newspapers struggle with about whether they should be catering to consumers, investors or the business community.

“Our readers are information junkies regardless of whether the economy is up or down,” said Neil Westergaard, editor of the Denver Business Journal. “We’re hoping to provide information so they can make better decisions as business men or women.”

Adds Don Henninger, publisher of the Phoenix Business Journal: “There’s a heck of a lot of competition in serving all needs rather than a niche. We focus on the niche and dive deep into it.”

The same is true for Crain’s Detroit Business, which since 1985 has carved out a reputation for itself as a business publication that seeks to cover underserved parts of the business community. From the start, the weekly made a decision to forego covering the Big Three Automakers.

“Many people thought we didn’t cover the Big Three because we owned Automotive News,” said executive editor Cindy Goodaker. “But the real reason was that everybody else was covering them. We wanted to know what else was out there to cover… We still have a lot of territory to ourselves. We are the only ones who cover nonprofits as a business, the operations of nonprofits.”

Like many business journals, Crain’s aims its coverage at small business owners, executives at different levels and salespeople. To make stories relevant, it constantly seeks out the “Crain’s angle” as they call it.

During the ongoing scandal of Detroit’s mayor sending romantic text messages to someone other than his wife the “Crain’s angle” was how the drama pumped up circulation, web hits and TV ratings for the local media.

Having such a clear focus is certainly not new for business weeklies, but it has now been supplemented by the Internet, which has shored up a major competitive disadvantage weeklies once faced: the once-a-week publishing schedule.

“We used to do a lot of negotiating with companies on when to release announcements,” said Westergaard, whose print edition comes out every Friday. “Now we just say give it to us the same time as everybody else so we can just pop it out on the Web.”

Email alerts have also proven remarkably popular among readers. In fact, the Denver Business Journal, part of the American City Business Journals family, has nearly as many online-only subscribers as those who receive its print product. One reason may be that readers can build their own alert Web pages based on business news they are seeking from any of the 41 cities where American City Business Journals operate.

So if a reader lives in Phoenix, but wants information on the Seattle area, it’s no problem.

“The synergies we get with 41 business journals are remarkable,” said Henninger. “We were a weekly newspaper. Now we’re far more than that.”

In fact, several editors and publishers of weekly business journals said 2007 was their best year yet.

“Business journals have tended to operate below the radar,” says Henry Dubroff, chairman and editor of the Pacific Coast Business Times, a weekly based in Santa Barbara, Calif. “Some national advertisers have discovered they are an effective way to reach a national audience if you can aggregate enough local markets.”

And with daily business sections' coverage skewed to larger companies, many business journals have found fertile ground in covering small- and mid-sized companies. That’s where the Phoenix Business Journal has made its mark.

“Phoenix has a remarkably healthy small- and mid-sized business community,” said Henninger. “That’s our market. As long as we do that, we’ll have a lot of appeal.”

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism