Investor’s Business Daily to become a weekly, 20 news jobs to be cut

Investor’s Business Daily, which has published five days a week since its founding in 1984, will announce next week that it will become a weekly newspaper and will focus its editorial efforts more online.

The change is expected to take effect on May 2, Talking Biz News has confirmed. The Los Angeles-based newspaper will be put to bed Friday evening and publish early the following week.

About 20 newsroom jobs will be cut as a result of the change, leaving slightly more than 40 in the editorial side of the newspaper. Additional cuts will be made in other departments.

“IBD has been profitable, but we recognize that readership trends don’t favor daily newspapers,” said managing editor Susan Warfel.  “We’re adjusting our business model now because we want to move from a position of strength and take advantage of the best growth opportunities in our business.”

Warfel said that the newspaper will retain the Investor’s Business Daily name because it will publish every day on the Internet.

At one point, Investor’s Business Daily hoped to grow to a subscription base of 700,000 to 1 million. And in 2000, its circulation was above 300,000. But the paper had a circulation or 113,038 in the third quarter of 2015, down from 157,161 in 2013. It had 46,213 print subscribers and 62,372 digital subscribers.

The newspaper’s website, www.investors.com, added a paywall more than a decade ago, and the newspaper believes that the shift to a web focus for most of the week will allow it to improve its profit margins.

IBD currently attracts over 4 million monthly unique visitors and publishes investment analysis products such as Leaderboard.  Several mobile-first product launches are scheduled within the next year.

The newspaper was started as Investor’s Daily by investor and stockbroker William O’Neil, who has since endowed a professorship in business journalism at Southern Methodist University. It changed its name to Investor’s Business Daily in 1991.

O’Neil was frustrated that he couldn’t obtain data about stocks in any other newspaper, including The Wall Street Journal, that he wanted to use to make investment decisions. Investor’s Business Daily’s stock listings include a proprietary ratings system.

Its core readers are self-directed investors, especially those who favor growth stocks who take a hands-on approach to their investments rather than leave the decision-making to someone else.

In 2008, the newspaper won its only Pulitzer Prize. Michael Ramirez, the editorial cartoonist for the newspaper, won the Pulitzer in that category.

Talking Biz News interviewed Warfel in May 2015 about the paper’s operation. Read that interview here.