Business Sections Struggle to Define Audience

By Chris Roush
April 20, 2006

When I'm talking to business editors and reporters around the country, I often ask a simple question: Who do you think is your audience?

The answer is either business people or average, everyday consumers, depending on the newspaper. The American City Business Journals' weekly papers across the country are good at catering their news content to the business owners and managers in their cities, for example. The Wall Street Journal does an excellent job of writing for its constituency as well.

It's most of the rest of you who haven't answered the question properly, or maybe even haven't thought about what the answer should be.

Ideally, a daily newspaper business section should try to strike a balance between providing content that will be of interest to the average consumer and offering stories that will also be read by the business executives in the readership area. But too often, I don't see that.

Take, for example, a newspaper in my backyard. The Greensboro News & Record is a paper that's on the forefront of a lot of trends. It's heavily into blogging and community journalism, for example, and I think that, overall, the paper is on the right track.

But with some exceptions, I struggle with its business section on many days I go to read it, and that's because the management has made a conscious effort to focus solely on news that will be of interest to consumers, not the Triad business community. So you'll rarely see stories about things going on inside local companies where the information would come from Securities and Exchange Commission filings or other interesting documents.

My problem? I think that the Greensboro business community - and I've talked to a few higher-ups there recently - feels as if the newspaper is ignoring them. As such, many of them don't read the News & Record for information about business.

That's good news for the writers and editors of the Triad Business Journal, but what does it mean in the long term for the N&R's biz section?

There are a few newspapers that I think do strike the right balance. Two that stand out in my mind are the San Jose Mercury News and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. When I read those papers, I get a great sense that the reporters and editors on those biz desks know the local business community, but they also know what's going to interest average consumers.

Think for yourself: Has your business news staff ever discussed who they're writing for? If they haven't, maybe it's time to have that talk.