Banner Headlines Scream Out About the Financial Crisis – Too Bad So Many US Newspapers Have Ditched Their Separate Business Sections!

Philip M. Stone October 14, 2008

Twenty years ago business news was the rave editorial growth topic for US newspapers -- separate stand-alone sections created, more business journalists hired, and plenty of space dedicated to local financial stories. But cost cutting is now the rage with primary targets those very separate business sections and their journalists with the few remaining locally produced financial news stories (as opposed to news releases) now mostly banished to the back of the news or sports section. Another perfect example of the wrong print move at the wrong time!

It doesn’t take a newspaper editorial genius to know that what sells newspapers is a good news story, and the current financial crisis is exactly that. There’s hardly a household anywhere not affected by the current credit and stock market mess and this is a story with very long legs – it is not going to go away any time soon. Even with the federal government moving from the announcement stage to the implementation stage (and how many newspapers now regret their Washington cutbacks?) on the more local level this is a story that is going to get bigger before it wilts. It is a story for which every household wants the most complete coverage possible; it is a story on which local and metropolitan newspapers should excel. In a perverse way, this story could be a newspaper lifesaver.

But bodies able to hit the street and get those local financial angles have been cut way back; newspapers have taken an axe to the number of pages they print each week, and if the 50-50 news-advertising split does really take hold just how many pages are there going to be in our favorite read in the weeks to come as advertisers continue to hold back even more of their spend?

The old fallacy that business news is boring or meant just for the executive suite has been tossed out of the window. Now every household wants to know what help, if any, there is going to be to help pay the mortgage, home owners want to know if possible buyers can get loans, if living on credit cards is a way of the past then how to make it in the new financial world, have local banks opened up their credit facilities to small business for loans at affordable rates and all the rest. And where should all of this information and more be found? Right! In those banished business sections.

And if that is the kind of information that every household is looking for then doesn’t it make sense that the advertising dollars will flow to surround that news, too. After all, advertisers are after eyeballs.

There is already some preliminary information of how the financial events of the past weeks has affected newspaper readership. In London, the Evening Standard paid-for PM saw that its September numbers up by 6.76% – it had suffered monthly circulation declines for more than a year since having to fight two free competitors that between them distribute 900,000 copies a day. All it took were scary banner  financial headlines on how bad things were getting and people were quite willing to fork out their 50p to get a full read instead of relying on the brief free newspaper coverage. 

London also has a financial free newspaper in the morning, City AM. It saw its September circulation up 20% over August (not forgetting August is the quietest month in the UK financial calendar with many people on their holidays, but 20% is still 20%). Jens Torpe, City AM CEO, explained, “In September, the impact of the financial crisis has changed the nature of business and financial news. It is now fast paced and instantaneous and audiences are demanding the latest developments and informed commentary with immediate urgency.”

The Financial Times saw its September print circulation grow 2.8% but online its September year-on-year growth was a whopping 300% up in page impressions and a 250% increase in unique users (but it should be remembered that in September, 2007, the FT web site was still fully subscription and it wasn’t until October of that year that it opened itself up allowing users free access to the first 30 stories accessed each month).

At the Wall Street Journal, every month has seemed lately to be a record month for its web site. It was just back in June it was boasting it had 16.2 million unique users a 94% year-on-year increase, and come September it announced that on one day it had an unprecedented two million visitors on one day.

Google reports that search queries on “stocks” tripled in September and Yahoo Finance general manager Mark Interrante told AFP, “Investment pages are just red hot right now with people wanting to know what is going on with stocks.”

Of course US readers wanting to know about stocks know better than to go to their daily newspapers  for in many cases most if not all of the financial data has been banished to the Web. And with so much of the local business and financial news disappearing or greatly reduced from print once again publishers have found another way to drive traffic to other people’s Web sites. National news will move on to other subjects, but this financial mess will stay with households for a long time to come.

But it’s not too late for print to recover and take advantage. Past actions can be back-tracked. Business sections can be resurrected. Now, whether there are enough bodies still around to fill the pages of those resurrected sections with the local and regional business news that readers crave is another matter, but the reader need is clear.

So, the opportunity is there to gain back lost readership. Will newspaper publishers take advantage?