Today I had the chance of picking the mind of Achilles from the International Herald Tribune, who last year was appointed Vice-President, circulation and development. Achilles is a family friend and I took the opportunity to talk to him about the world of media and the challenges being faced.
The IHT is one of the three daily financial newspapers of the world, along with the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. It is currently owned by the New York Times, and has a global circulation of 240,000 people. I had a great chat on a lot of different themes which could have me blog about for a week straight, but here are some of the facts I picked up from our discussion, which I will summarise below as future talking points:
- On Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal: “very interested to see if he will remove the paid wall”.
- The IHT experiemented with a paid wall for it’s opinion content, but they will be removing that later this year
- He says the Bancroft family sold it because they are emotionally detached from the product. It was just an asset to them.
- A lot of the content is simply reedited content from the NYT and internationalising it. For example, replacing sentences like “Kazakhstan in the size of New York state” doesn’t work well for an international reader who has no idea how big New York state is.
- On the threat of citizen journalism with traditional media: “they are a competitive threat because we are competing for the same scarce resource: the attention of readers”
- The problem with citizen journalism and bloggers is the validity of their information - behind a newspapers brand, is trust from readers of the large amounts of research and factchecking that occur. They have no credibility.
- A blog may develop credibility with an audience greater than the New York Times. But this poses problems for advertising as advertisers might only advertise because of its niche audience. Blogs are spreading the advertising dollars, which is hurting everyone - it’s become decentralised and that has implications which are problematic.
- The IHT’s circulation is spread thinly across the world. For example, it has 30,000 readers in France and six in Mauritius.
- Their target market is largely the business traveller, which has its own unique benefits and problems. For example, a business traveler will read it for two days but when they get back home, they will revert to their normal daily newspaper. It’s not a very loyal reader.
- Readership is a more important concept than circulation as it tells advertisers how big the actual audience of a publication is. For example, the average newspaper has 2.7 readers per copy. However due to the nature of the IHT’s readers, despite having high circulation, they have low readership.
- IHT is in a unique position of relying on circulation revenue more than advertising. For example, a normal daily relies on circulation revenue as 20% of its total revenue; the IHT counts on it for 50%.
- It’s hard to get advertising because a readership of university professors is less desirable than fund managers that might read the WSJ. Advertisers prefer to target key decision makers.
- It doesn’t rely on classifieds as a revenue source - a key thing hurting the newspaper industry currently.
- Although they place more reliance on circulation revenue, they still get some good advertising opportunities as a lot of readers are politicians and government decision makers.
- They get a lot of advertising for fashion
- Psychographic data is more important to advertisers than circulation and it shows what type of readership a publication has.
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