Neil Bierbaum
Independent Newspapers (formerly Argus) is struggling with its attempts to move from the afternoon to the morning market.
And in an attempt to boost Business Report, the company is to introduce the four-page international weekly edition of the Wall Street Journal on Mondays.
Independent Newspaper’s own survey of Business Report, conducted in the third month of the business supplement, showed that at least 52 percent of The Star readers (49 percent for The Pretoria News) said that they read it after 4pm. This reflects an apparent resistance to Independent’s attempts to attract a morning readership by carrying Business Report in the newly introduced morning editions of both papers.
A similar trend is evident in the Cape Times, where 22 percent of readers read the report after 4pm, in spite of the fact that it is carried by a morning-only paper. Thirty-six percent of Cape Times readers read Business Report before 9am (54 percent for The Mercury, also a morning-only). Perhaps the summer will produce a different result, particularly in Cape Town.
Nationally, Business Report is read by 35 percent of the readers of its carrier titles. Broken down by individual titles, the percent of Business Report readers relative to the carrier was: Cape Times 39 percent; Mercury 38 percent; The Pretoria News 44 percent; and The Star 29 percent. For The Star only 70 000 copies carry Business Report although the readership was based on the average daily 182 119 copies of The Star sold.
Twenty-six percent of the 464 000 Business Report readers were not reading the business pages of the carrier titles before the launch of Business Report.
>From October, Business Report will carry the four-page international version of The Wall Street Journal on Mondays. ADvertising will be sold internationally, although there are opportunities for local advertisers, at R128 per column cm. A full colour page will cost R69 120 excluding VAT, a half page R34 560 and a quarter page R17 280.