Categories: OLD Media Moves

How to disrupt the biz press newsletter business

Daniel Mark Harrison, former Asia correspondent for TheStreet.com, writes about strategies that would disrupt the lucrative newsletter business used by Forbes, Fortune and others.

Harrison writes, “Disruption happens when a technology that has implied scale-bound leverage is utilized to offer an ultimately (empirically speaking) lower-quality product to a market that cannot afford or does not feel comfortable paying the price for a competing product with a 100% authentic quality guarantee. For the customer, the disruptor’s product offering is a chance to get as close to the real thing as he/she possibly can without having to fork out the huge sums of money or go to the inconvenience of purchasing that genuine artifact.

“There is no reason to doubt that a very high-quality business and financial news publication offered for free to customers and which has full utilization of Google News headline and stock ticker presence, would not succeed by offering a range of newsletters priced at a fraction of the cost of the sum of the major branded investment tipsheets combined.

“For it is clear that demand is so high for such tip sheets that some investors are willing to pay up to $2500 a year or more to subscribe to them; thus for a small portion of that totalling $100 a year or so, it is highly likely that a market exists for substitute products which are not as detailed or methodical in terms of the analysis and advice that is offered but which claim to have the same focus exactly as the branded versions do.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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