May 14, 2007
A Brilliant Product Poorly Managed
More from the Rupert is Nuts to Offer $60 file:
The paper introduced a Saturday issue in September 2005, hoping to tap deeper into consumer ads and make itself competitive on coverage of news that breaks on Fridays … The Weekend Edition of the Journal may turn out to be a smart long-term strategy but for now, it loses money, and will continue to do so for some time. Dow Jones has said that the weekend Journal lowered earnings by about 15 cents a share last year, which translates to a loss of about $12 million.
The Weekend Edition will never turn out to be “a smart long-term strategy;” it will lose money forever. The fact that they went ahead with the project is proof that DJ management is scarily out of touch. I wrote before the launch that the Saturday Edition was a “dumb idea.”
