WOOD: BUSINESS JOURNALS THRIVE

If you like to read magazines and newspapers devoted to your business or hobby interests, you're not alone, a publishing executive said Thursday.

Thomas Wood said Thursday that special-interest publications will continue to grow, and that business publications are the fastest-growing segment of the newspaper market.

Wood, the vice president and group publisher for American City Business Journals and former publisher of the St. Louis Business Journal, is Southeast Missouri State University's 1997 College of Business Alumni Merit Award Winner.

American City Business Journals, a subsidiary of Advance Publications and the S.I. Newhouse publishing group, is a group of 35 weekly business journals, including the St. Louis Business Journal, and several other specialty publications, including three motor sports magazines, a legal daily newspaper, the Street & Smith's sports annuals.

Next week, the company will acquire newspapers in Nashville and Memphis, and additional publications will be added to the lineup in 1998, including the Sports Business Journal, Wood said.

The company employs more than 1,600 people, and its projected revenues for this year top $180 million.

The Houston Business Journal, founded in 1971 in an entrepreneur's garage, was the nation's first business journal, Wood said.

Today, there are more than 100 weekly business newspapers scattered across the country, he said.

"In a matter of 25, 26 years, there's been an explosion of growth" in the market, Wood said.

In-depth coverage of local and regional business news was largely an untapped market when the first business journal began publication.

Major metropolitan daily newspapers were "asleep at the switch" when it came to covering business news, Wood said, and there were only a handful of national business publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Fortune magazine and Forbes magazine.

"They couldn't possibly do on a local basis what they do on a national basis," he said.

Publications like business journals can do something big daily newspapers can't, Wood said: Target news coverage to meet a specific audience's needs.

"Metro daily newspapers have a tough job. They have to provide something for the masses," he said. "We provide something for a very targeted audience, and it's really only the executives that we target for."

American City Business Journals' average reader is 46 years old, and 94 percent of their readers are college graduates with an average annual household income of $156,000 and an average an employment income of $103,000. The average net worth of their readership is $1.1 million.

Nationally, major metropolitan dailies like the New York Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch are losing circulation and advertising revenue.

But mid-size newspapers that emphasize community and specialty publications like business journals are growing in circulation and advertising revenue, Wood said.

"It's amazing what's happened with the metro daily newspapers," he said. "Yet more people are reading, and smaller newspapers are growing."

As more and more information becomes available, Americans are targeting their reading interests to those publications that fit their needs and interests, Wood said.

"Thirty years ago, the main source of information was the daily newspaper and three TV networks," he said.

In the years since, talk radio, cable television and a variety of publications have grown, "and all of them are niche productions," he said.

"And then you look at any good newsstand and you'll see hundreds of special-interest publications. People seem to be more intense about their careers and what they're doing. They want more information, and they're not going to the general publications to get it."

Readers have become "very selective" about what they read, and general circulation newspapers can't keep up, Wood said.

"I'm constantly amazed at some of the specialty titles I see on newsstands," he said. "I keep saying, `They can do a magazine on that?'"

Wood's firm is also taking advantage of the Internet to sell subscriptions and advertising in its publications and to sell books through its Bizbooks company.

Wood spoke Thursday to Advertising and Marketing Professionals (AMP) at Drury Lodge.