Essays of Africa, Financial Mail, New York Design Hunting, Soccer Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine and TIME — MediaSlut’s weekly pick!
Tag archives: financial mail
MagLove: The best magazine covers this week (11 March 2016)
Bloomberg Businessweek, Financial Mail (South Africa), Newsweek, The Economist and TIME — MediaSlut’s choice this week!
Grubstreet: New-look Financial Mail
by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) BDFM’s Financial Mail is getting a brand new look this week and Grubstreet had a sneak peek at the long overdue revamp.
Times Media buys out Pearson stake in BDFM
by Herman Manson (@marklives) Times Media Group (TMG) has announced that Avusa Publishing, a subsidiary of TMG, has reached an agreement with Pearson to acquire Pearson’s 50% shareholding in BDFM Publishers.
BDFM publishes Business Day and the Financial Mail and owns African Broadcasting Channel which broadcasts Summit, the Home Channel, Ignition and Saffron on DSTV in Southern Africa.
“The full acquisition of BDFM by TMG will allow for economies of scale, an integrated operations platform and operational synergies, and will permit BDFM, under unified ownership, to accelerate its digital transformation,” TMG said in an announcement on the JSE news service SENS.
With BDLive Business Day hopes to save its bacon
by Herman Manson (@marklives) Business Day recently shifted gear to relaunch as a ‘digital first’ news product rather than just the printed newspaper it’s been bargaining on to keep the brand afloat. It’s a strategy that’s long overdue and hopes to mimic some of the digital success achieved by the Financial Times (Pearson, owner of FT, also has a stake in BDFM which publishes Business Day).
The print product really had no choice but to reinvent itself as it and other business publications face the loss of revenue from financial notices by JSE listed companies – these notices, described by critics as a forced ‘subsidy’ for print business media, is set to fall away after changes to regulations by the JSE. The industry is expected to lose a significant percentage of the estimated R200m currently spent on these notices annually.
Advertising revenue has also started shifting towards digital environments in line with developments in other economies.
Bronwen Auret, GM: BDFM Digital, agrees that those in the business of business news face challenges but she is also excited about the opportunities the new digital centric model will afford the company.
Newspapers are the least sexy media right now, say Aurent, and where to from (for now still) profitable print have been a predicament for most newspaper proprietors given the high cost of bandwidth and slower Internet uptake by the South African market.
With the uptick in usage of online and mobile thanks to more competitive pricing and competition by mobile data providers the market is shifting and the introduction of apps has made South Africans more familiar and comfortable with ecommerce.
Finweek’s gospel according to Marc
The recent repositioning of business magazine Finweek has upped the stakes in what many consider a rather stale magazine segment. Not that a lot isn’t happening in the business press, or that it isn’t already highly competitive – take the recent entry of Forbes Africa into the fray, or how the tablet market has opened up access to publications such as Bloomberg Businessweek to South African consumers.
It’s just that, for a while now, business media has seemed stale in a time when interest in the economy and business management news has skyrocketed, courtesy of the Great Recession, the sovereign debt crisis, and the ‘double dip’ bogeyman that keeps entrepreneurs awake at night.
Publishers explain ABCs hits, misses
The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) released the local print media’s 2011 first quarter circulation figures earlier this week and, as usual, it makes for interesting reading. A couple of figures really jump out as worth investigating.