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Wall Street Journal
Nifty idea, sure, but is it real or just Times envy?
There was a time not so long ago when The Wall Street Journal seemed incapable of doing anything wrong and The New York Times couldn't seem to do anything right when it came to building a presence as a national newspaper.
Fortunes have changed, to the chagrin of the Journal, with the Times becoming the paper in ascendancy in recent years.
And now Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, is thinking about doing something about it -- launching a Saturday edition of the nation's largest business newspaper.
The operative term here, though, is thinking.
Whether Dow Jones goes ahead with the idea is quite something else, and one might suspect word of the idea, which broke yesterday, is being floated as much to gauge the reaction of the advertising community as anything.
As briefly outlined in a Dow Jones newswire story, the paper envisions a Saturday edition that would put it in direct competition with business magazines such as Business Week, as well as The New York Times.
An internal memo at the paper reveals that a top editor has been assigned to investigate the viability of such an edition. But the paper declined to reveal much more about the project.
At first blush a Saturday edition of the Journal would seem a smart idea as a sixth day to carry business news that broke on Friday and an opportunity to become even more attractive to the consumer advertisers that seem to flock to the Times, and thereby less dependent on the long-suffering technology and financial advertisers that have been the paper's traditional advertisers.
Attracting such advertisers has been a paramount effort in recent years, and to abet that effort the paper has launched features and sections covering the sorts of lifestyle stories that were unheard of just two decades ago.
In 1998, the Journal launched a Weekend Journal that features advertiser-friendly stories on high-end recreations and lifestyles.
In 2000 the paper launched a Sunday Journal insert that's now carried in some 74 papers around the country offering features on investing.
There is something else especially appealing about a Saturday Journal, and that is a publication that is read over the weekend, a time of far fewer media distractions.
Historically, Saturday was the day Americans received a number of publications, from the now-defunct Saturday Review, a journal of politics and culture, to Barron's, the financial publication. The Economist arrives on Friday, anticipating the weekend.
Saturday, or the weekend, was considered a time for readers to reflect more deeply on the events of the world that were reported in the prior week, and that distinction gave Saturday publications a certain intellectual cachet.
But a Saturday Journal would be a major undertaking, one whose benefits might be hard to realize, at least short-term. And that may explain why the idea has been broached in the past by Dow Jones executives but not acted upon.
Certainly one challenge would be distribution. The daily Journal goes primarily to business addresses, whereas a Saturday edition would go to readers' homes, which would require creating an elaborate distribution network, presumably either a vast fleet of trucks or deals with local papers to deliver the edition with their Saturday papers.
But another issue would be assessing the value of a Saturday issue to both readers and advertisers. Saturday papers are traditionally thin, and for good reason. Consumers are often out that day and probably spend less time reading newspapers.
Further complicating matters, a Saturday paper would risk duplicating editorial carried in its Sunday insert.
January 9, 2003© 2003 Media Life
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