Words Dept.: entry

Here are a few instantaneous thoughts on the sad closure of Crain’s Manchester Business, which was announced today. As a local business journalist who was very occasionally (ahem) scooped by the paper, it goes without saying that I have lots of respect for their journalists. But here’s a few quick thoughts on what went wrong:

1. They didn’t sell enough adverts. Sounds fairly obvious but estimates suggest Crain’s would have had to have made up to £25,000 a week in advertising just to break even. Anyone who ever picked up a copy of Crain’s will have noticed that there weren’t very many adverts in it, and their “no discount” policy is well documented. However, assurances were made that the title would have five years to start making money. Perhaps the recession accelerated that process; after two-and-a-half years, the magazine has closed.

2. They were too fearless. Crain’s always seemed to me to have a sort of fearlessness about it, which was great. But it’s not difficult to imagine that its “no bullshit” approach did little to endear it to potential advertisers used to their cosy relationship with the MEN. I was told by contacts from time to time that they’d stopped talking to Crain’s, supposedly because the paper had messed up some story or other. But from what I could see Crain’s very rarely got things wrong, it just printed things that others either missed or ignored. This got up people’s noses.

3. There isn’t enough news (and a lot of it is boring). I think I might have said this before, but how many business magazines does a place need? As well as the MEN, which has had its own problems over the last two years, there’s also the long-established Insider, which rightly increased its news/online efforts immediately after Crain’s launched. (Disclaimer: I freelance for Insider.) The free-to-access Business Desk North West, which has done well under the editorship of former MEN Business Editor Chris Barry after launching less than a year after Crain’s, has further queered the pitch, while there are also various sector-specific business news websites like How-Do and Place North West. Crain’s should be commended for, in the main, having a proper news agenda that avoided recycling press releases. But there has to be a limit over the amount of business coverage people actually need.

4. It had no local roots. Manchester is the seat of the industrial revolution. Parachuting an American brand into a city as rich in business heritage as Manchester, albeit with a crowd of highly capable local journalists, was always going to be risky. And, when things don’t go to plan, a US owner isn’t going to weep over the closure of an outpost thousands of miles away. The writing was perhaps on the wall when Crain’s parted company with Manchester-based publisher Arthur Porter in January, in slightly mysterious circumstances.

5. The timing was wrong. Launching a business magazine in autumn 2007 was a terrible idea given the banking crisis, property crash, unemployment bubble and recession that followed. All this is easy to talk about in hindsight, perhaps, but the fact remains that Crain’s timing was absolutely bloody awful.