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Time Marches
On Without Asiaweek
By Michael Alan Hamlin
December 3, 2001
The global economic slowdown, exacerbated many fold
by the September 11 atrocity, has caused a heavy bloodletting in
media as advertising revenues have plummeted. In recent weeks Hong
Kong's iMail cut around 100 positions as it remade itself into a
business paper. Rival South China Morning Post, despite being a
perennial cash cow, cut 18 jobs. But some of the biggest, and easily
the most shocking, changes are taking place in regional English-language
media.
Last Thursday Time Inc. announced that the Asiaweek
issue that appeared that day would be its last. Over the past several
weeks Dow Jones merged the editorial staffs of The Asian Wall Street
Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review, which enjoyed a banner
year last year following a major makeover. But this year's been
different, and about 25 percent of the combined staff was laid off.
Although generous separation benefits were provided according to
insiders, the layoffs will make for a pretty gloomy holiday season.
The demise of Asiaweek after 26 years of publishing
Asian news came after its May re-launch as a regional business magazine.
With a slick new design, dramatic use of graphics, and tighter editorial
industry pundits and readers speculated that this time the magazine
had got it right. That appears to be the case, or was the case,
until September 11. A Time spokesperson said the magazine had done
well, but September 11 "threw our strategy up in the air."
Although freedom of speech is a constitutional right
in many countries, it's a right that only profitable publications
can exercise. Publishing is increasingly a big business game, dominated
by media conglomerates like Time, Inc. and Rupert Murdoch's News
Corp. That Asiaweek survived 26 years as a marginally profitable
magazine at best suggests that Time, which bought Asiaweek in the
90s, and the magazine's previous owners are patient when it comes
to strategic investments. Murdock's Star TV is another example.
The network has never made money, and probably won't in the foreseeable
future. But Murdock believes the network's losses are a precursor
to regional domination of the broadcast sector.
There's no indication that Murdock will pull the plug
on Star the way Time is shedding Asiaweek. But it is increasingly
clear that even in good times, long-term strategic investments that
lose hundreds of millions of dollars for decades are going the way
of the dinosaurs. From a business perspective, even among the most
fervent strategic thinkers, that's exactly what should happen. Three
decades is a long time to be losing money, or making just a little.
These days journalism is not just business, it's a
public business, with shareholders who expect their investments
to grow. The downturn in global markets and the dot-com bust have
refocused investor attention on the bottom line. And media are not
immune from criticism when they fail to meet investor expectations.
There's always a competitor happy to take the poor performer to
task.
Asiaweek had a circulation of 120,000. That's a small
magazine for conglomerates that have numerous publications with
circulations that run from close to a million to several million.
Those 120,000 readers were mostly up-and-coming professionals in
Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. They benefited from world-class
reporting, and in Malaysia and Singapore, uncensored reporting as
well. In the last several months Asiaweek has run impressive features
on the impact of the Internet in Asia, movers and shakers, and top-performing
managers and their companies. I relied on Asiaweek for insights
into Asia's diverse economies and cultures, and frequently quoted
exceptional stories both in the columns I write and in my books.
What will readers like me do without Asiaweek? There
are alternatives, at least for now. But it's reasonable to wonder
how long those alternatives will be around. That's because most
of the alternatives don't make much money either, if any, even in
good times. So is Asia's half century (the Review was founded shortly
after World War II) experiment with dedicated regional English-language
publications coming to a close?
It's not hard to argue that that's what's happening.
As Asia and Asians become more prosperous, readership of English-language
publications is going up. But what they seem to be reading is international
publications and their Asian editions. Regional publications can't
match the reach of their international competitors, and Asian readers
are likely to rely on local publications for local news.
Another factor is the Internet, which has made both
local and international news much easier to get to for precisely
the demographic profile that subscribes to magazines like Asiaweek.
Probably more important, however, is that Asians just don't care
that much about what is happening elsewhere in Asia. They care about
their place, and maybe, cultures similar to their own.
The dream of a meaningful, profitable regional publication
was an interesting one. But apparently, not a good one.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing director of consultancy
TeamAsia and the author of three books on Asian economies and companies.
His latest book is Marketing Asian Places, of which he is
a co-author (Wiley, 2001).)
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