{"id":110,"date":"2007-08-05T19:12:05","date_gmt":"2007-08-05T09:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/Liako.Biz\/2007\/08\/110\/"},"modified":"2007-08-05T19:12:05","modified_gmt":"2007-08-05T09:12:05","slug":"a-casual-chat-with-a-media-industry-insider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/a-casual-chat-with-a-media-industry-insider\/","title":{"rendered":"A casual chat with a media industry insider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I had the chance of picking the mind of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ihtinfo.com\/pages\/p_executives.html\"><span class=\"ccbnTxt\">Achilles<\/span><\/a><span class=\"ccbnTxt\"> from the <a href=\"http:\/\/iht.com\">International Herald Tribune<\/a>, who last year was <\/span><span class=\"ccbnTxt\">appointed <a href=\"http:\/\/phx.corporate-ir.net\/phoenix.zhtml?c=105317&amp;p=irol-newsArticle&amp;ID=901225&amp;highlight=\">Vice-President, circulation and development<\/a><\/span>. Achilles is a family friend and I took the opportunity to talk to him about the world of media and the challenges being faced.<\/p>\n<p>The IHT is one of the three daily financial newspapers of the world, along with the <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em> and the <em>Financial Times<\/em>. It is currently owned by the <em>New York Times<\/em>, 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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On Murdoch&#8217;s acquisition of the <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em>: &#8220;very interested to see if he will remove the paid wall&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>The IHT experiemented with a paid wall for it&#8217;s opinion content, but they will be removing that later this year<\/li>\n<li>He says the Bancroft family sold it because they are emotionally detached from the product. It was just an asset to them.<\/li>\n<li>A lot of the content is simply reedited content from the NYT and internationalising it. For example, replacing sentences like &#8220;Kazakhstan in the size of New York state&#8221; doesn&#8217;t work well for an international reader who has no idea how big New York state is.<\/li>\n<li>On the threat of citizen journalism with traditional media: &#8220;they are a competitive threat because we are competing for the same scarce resource: the attention of readers&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>The problem with citizen journalism and bloggers is the validity of their information &#8211; behind a newspapers brand, is trust from readers of the large amounts of research and factchecking that occur. They have no credibility.<\/li>\n<li>A blog may develop credibility with an audience greater than the <em>New York Times.<\/em> 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 &#8211; it&#8217;s become decentralised and that has implications which are problematic.<\/li>\n<li>The IHT&#8217;s circulation is spread thinly across the world. For example, it has 30,000 readers in France and six in Mauritius.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;s not a very loyal reader.<\/li>\n<li> 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&#8217;s readers, despite having high circulation, they have low readership.<\/li>\n<li>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%.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li>It doesn&#8217;t rely on classifieds as a revenue source &#8211; a key thing hurting the newspaper industry currently.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>They get a lot of advertising for fashion<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Psychographic\">Psychographic<\/a> data is more important to advertisers than circulation and it shows what type of readership a publication has.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,65,66,86,408,119,153,158,188,190,228,248,249,250,261,313,422,391,396,397,399],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-attentioneconomy","tag-advertising","tag-attention","tag-attention-economy","tag-brand","tag-business","tag-data","tag-france","tag-future","tag-iht","tag-information","tag-mass-media","tag-new-media","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-times","tag-opportunity","tag-search","tag-travel","tag-wall-street-journal","tag-wiki","tag-wikipedia","tag-wsj","post-preview"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}