They travel to some of the most exotic nations on earth. They get
to visit their own corporate equivalents of ’Q’ branch before departure
and are issued with the latest in hi-tech equipment. Above all, they’re
about the only people left in this prosaic age who can get a vodka
martini, shaken not stirred, on expenses of course.
Today’s businessmen and women are a rather more glamorous version of
their workmanlike predecessors. They can cross the globe - virtually, or
in person - and, as a consequence perhaps, seldom consider themselves
constrained by national boundaries. English or American, Japanese, Thai
or Vietnamese, they share more with each other than they ever do with
outsiders.
Inevitably, this is increasingly reflected in the media they
consume.
Many businesspeople read the same newspapers and magazines and watch the
same programmes. The language of business magazines, like the language
of business itself, is increasingly a sophisticated, cosmopolitan and,
above all, international.
’We are international and stress the links between politics and
business,’ Bill Emmott, editor of the Economist, says. ’At a time when
business is internationalising and when more countries are striving to
join the world economy, we think our approach is ever more relevant and
important.’
Certainly the Economist has gone further down the route of
internationalism than any other title - after all, fully 82 per cent of
its worldwide circulation is derived from outside the UK, its country of
origin. But there has also been a widespread acceptance among the
publishers and broadcasters in general of the importance of a truly
global presence.
And this hasn’t merely been achieved through their work on the Internet,
impressive though this has been. The Wall Street Journal Interactive
edition, for example, is now the largest paid-for publication site on
the Web, and its publisher, Peter Kann, was able to tell readers earlier
this year: ’Journal content is available in virtually any form, time or
place - Internet, intra-day, internationally.’
For all that, it’s the success some publishers have had taking the
printed version of titles to opinion-formers across the globe that has
proved so impressive. Early this year, the Financial Times revamped its
international edition, for example, and the changes provide a valuable
guide to the current preoccupations of the business media. The front
page was redesigned, bringing lead international stories to the fore and
an extra page of news from the Americas was added. An international
people section was added to give details of job changes and stocks from
countries such as the Czech Republic, Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and
Thailand were added to the FT’s more usual fare from the world’s most
important markets - Tokyo, New York, London, Frankfurt and Paris. The
international business media - the former Soviet Bloc, the Americas and,
above all, the Tiger economies of South-east Asia - all focus on the
global angle of stories.
As part of the FT relaunch, a page was dedicated solely to Asia-Pacific
news. This is the region that is seen as providing the quickest route to
growth. Dow Jones has published the Asian Wall Street Journal since
1976, but only since the emergence of Asian economic powers over the
past few years has the region really taken off.
The good news is that recent hiccups in the Asian economic performance
have not yet spilled over into the media that feed off the region. The
crisis fuelled by a property crash in Thailand has helped check
Indonesia’s impressive growth but overall confidence in the region
remains high, especially now that more of the media owners are reaching
critical mass in the area and feel able to produce more localised
editions and discrete programming.
S. K. Fung, the Asia president of NBC, says: ’Distribution of our
business news channel, CNBC, has doubled over the past 11 months. It now
reaches eight million homes in the Asia-Pacific region. We think this
growth validates our programming strategy of responding to market needs
through localisation and programme development.We’re getting more
viewers every day for the channel across Asia.’
Now CNBC is launching local programming for India. A localised version
of CNBC launched in October last year and, together with the
entertainment and information channel, NBC, now reaches three million
households in metropolitan areas. Malaysia is a new market for the
channel, while distribution in Thailand has increased by more than 200
per cent over the past year.
Mark Proudfoot of MediaCom says: ’Asia still offers the prospect of
growth for media owners. The tiger economies are still booming despite
the occasional scare.’ Proudfoot has returned to the UK to run the
Fortune business after nearly three years in Hong Kong.
The penetration made by the international business magazines in the
region is even more impressive than that of their broadcast
counterparts.
The Economist, for example, is read by 52 per cent of institutional
investors in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a major world-wide
study by Erdos & Morgan.
In the UK and on the Continent, that figure rises to around 80 per cent
but, in the US, drops to around a third.
The growing importance of Asia can be realised by merely glancing
through the magazines’ editorial calendar. Next month, for example,
Fortune is launching its first in-depth analysis of Asia’s leading
wealth creators, while three of the year’s 16 special reports are
centred on the region.
The Economist, on the other hand, is dedicating two surveys it has
pencilled in for the first quarter of next year to Asia and Asian
issues.
But it’s not just the growing internationalism of business that has
forced the magazines to seek to construct global empires. To an extent,
the titles have been forced to look farther afield for circulation and
ad revenue.
Competition in the more mature markets is fierce. And it’s getting more
so. The European is the latest challenger.
It started life as Robert Maxwell’s typically perverse take on the Daily
Mail - a sort of mid-market broadsheet for the whole of Europe.
Unfortunately, the mid-market broadsheet reading classes of Europe
didn’t think of themselves as sufficiently ’European’ to buy it - and a
circulation of around 155,000, and a relatively humble audience
demographic, was hardly going to make it viable in that particular
guise.
The one class that does see itself as existing beyond national barriers
is the business class, and the new-look paper targets them. In July,
readers got their first look at the new paper - an upmarket 64-page
tabloid far removed from its previous incarnation as a multi-section
broadsheet.
The cultural magazine, Elan, was one of the first things to go and the
editor-in-chief, Andrew Neil, has said he is prepared for circulations
to fall back to around 100,000 as the paper’s readership profile
changes.
The new focus of the title is on economically important areas of Europe,
with Germany the top priority. German news coverage has already been
increased and the idea of a separate German-language edition is now
being discussed.
Similarly, the Dow Jones and Flextech joint venture, EBN, believes it
has identified room for growth in the supposedly mature European
market.
Maybe, but the real battle for businesspeople’s hearts, minds and
disposable income has, one suspects, already moved on.
THE ECONOMIST
Owner: Pearson/The Economist
US Circulation: 278,176
European Circulation, ex UK: 134,974
UK Circulation: 112,052
Asia Circulation: 57,931
Worldwide Circulation: 630,021
Website www.theeconomist.com
Other Information:
The Economist’s worldwide circulation has almost doubled over the past
decade and it has a worldwide readership figure of around 2.5
million.
Circulation of the magazine outside the UK accounts for 83 per cent of
sales and it’s sold in 180 countries. The average personal income of
readers worldwide is dollars 124,000. In the UK, the average is a
comparatively modest pounds 68,000. It also publishes six surveys a
year. Topics range from Tourism to Central Asia’s Oil Economies. The
Economist Intelligence Unit publishes a range of specialist titles,
often with a regional slant.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Owner: Dow Jones & Company
US Circulation: 1,837,194
European Circulation: 65,657
Asia Circulation: 56,467
Worldwide Circulation: 1,959,318
Website www.wsj.com
Other Information
The Journal became the first western newspaper publisher to look to the
Asian market when it launched the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1976.
The Wall Street Journal Europe, published in Belgium, launched in 1983
and employs 50 editorial staff in 18 cities. In addition, bannered pages
from the paper are translated and syndicated to national newspapers with
a combined circulation of some 4.5 million in countries ranging from
Canada to China. The Wall Street Journal Americas, translated into
Spanish and Portuguese, appears in 20 Latin American newspapers with a
combined circulation of 2.2 million.
FINANCIAL TIMES
Owner: Pearson
US Circulation: 34,019
European Circulation ex UK: 85,926
UK Circulation: 326,676
Asia Circulation: 8,468
Worldwide Circulation: 456,553
Website www.FT.com
Other Information
The FT has some catching up to do if it is to achieve its stated goal of
reinventing itself as a true international title, but it has moved
swiftly since opening its first overseas print centre in Frankfurt in
1979. The newspaper is printed in eight countries, including Japan and,
since March 1996, Hong Kong.
The FT’s editor, Richard Lambert, is based in New York, where the paper
is concentrating its overseas effort. The FT’s reach of senior executive
in large US companies has grown by 70 per cent since 1994 and the scope
for growth is felt to be huge.
FORTUNE
Owner: Time Warner
US Circulation: 775,031
European Circulation ex UK: 31,837
UK Circulation: 11,682
Asia Circulation: 53,438
Worldwide Circulation: 900,871
Website www.fortune.com
Other Information
Fortune has been one of the editorial success stories of recent years
and has now started to make broadening its global reach a priority. Two
thirds of Fortune’s North American readers have business dealing outside
the country. It still sells more copies in Asia than in Europe and in
addition to 12 Asian editions in 18 countries, publishes Fortune China,
with a circulation of 51,000. Fortune Americas is a free-standing,
20-page insert composed of editorial material from Fortune translated
into Spanish and Portuguese.
BLOOMBERG
Owner: Bloomberg
Bloomberg TV: US Distribution N/A
European Cable Distribution: 4.07 million households
News Radio Network: 100 Affiliates
Bloomberg Magazine: Worldwide Circulation 180,000
Website www.bloomberg.com
Other Information
Bloomberg is trying to leverage the success of its innovative real-time
financial data provision service, delivered 24-hours a day to more than
250,000 financial professionals and organisations worldwide, into the
mainstream media. Bloomberg TV broadcasts around the world in seven
languages. The New York radio station, Bloomberg News Radio, has more
than 100 affiliates worldwide. The wire service, Bloomberg News,
provides business news to more than 850 newspapers, while the Bloomberg
magazine has an average reader age of 34 and an average personal income
of pounds 80,000.
THE EUROPEAN
Owner: Barclay Brothers
US Circulation: 22,406
European Circulation ex UK: 78,395
UK Circulation: 47,367
Worldwide Circulation: 155,024
Website www.the-european.com
Other Information
The title is energetically reinventing itself in the mould of its
editor-in-chief, Andrew Neil, as an international business title. It
claims a worldwide readership of 612,000, including more than a quarter
of European Members of Parliament. The average personal income of
readers is dollars 82,000 while 44 per cent of the paper’s readers fall
into the AB socio-demographic group. Neil’s priority is to help improve
on both of those figures.
BUSINESS WEEK
Owner: McGraw-Hill
US Circulation: 920,618
European Circulation ex UK: 46,652
UK Circulation: 14,641
Asia Circulation: 48,922
Worldwide Circulation: 1,069,227
Website www.businessweek.com
Other Information
Business Week has 24 worldwide bureaux and claims a worldwide readership
of 6.8 million. It has one of the most loyal readerships of any of the
business titles. In North America, more than half of the subscribers
have been reading the title for more than five years, while half of all
international subscribers have been readers for more than three
years.
EBN
Owner: Dow Jones & Co and Flextech
Partial Day Distribution: UK Households 3.4million
Germany: 6.6 million
Norway: 170,000
France: 101,470
Full-time Distribution: 10.8 million
Gross Distribution: 21.1 million
Website www.ebn.co.uk
REUTERS
Owner: Reuters
Bureaux: 163
Revenue Breakdown:
Europe: 54 per cent
Asia: 17 per cent
Americas: 15 per cent
Website www.reuters.com
Other Information
News is gathered for business and media clients in 25 languages.
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