Days Late & Business Week is for Sale for a Dollar

McGraw Hill is shopping Business Week and the talk on the streets is that the 80 years of content will be available for a stunning $1. That's not a typo. That is one dollar (I am assuming US). So what gives? Isn't the archives of 80 years worth a heckuva lot more than $1 -- as well as the subscriber list of nearly a million names?

I spoke with Reed Phillips, Managing Partner, Philips DeSilva who helped unravel the challenges that print companies like McGraw Hill are facing. "The assets are certainly worth more than a dollar," he agreed. "The problem is the losses are far outweighing the positives." Anyone who buys Business Week would take on the liability of servicing nearly a million subscribers -- "from whom McGraw Hill has already taken the cash." He estimated that servicing alone costs roughly $30-40 million. Additionally, the company lost nearly $90 million in revenue in the first half of this year alone is part of the tale.

"If it was easy to fix, McGraw Hill would have done it," he added.

Maybe so, but loving a challenge, here is what I would do if I had the opportunity.

Make sure all content was digitally available
I don't know whether Business Week's entire archive has been digitized or not -- but would invest to make it so.

Semantically Index All Content
By linguistically analyzing and enriching all content, I would have a better understanding of just what that 80-year archive contained:

• Number of pieces of content under a given topic
• Word count for each article
• Tone of every article by Organization

By the way, I would semantically analyze the comments too.

Relate & Link
Similar content should be easily linked so editors on the back end can find and package it, while readers on the front end can consume it. Business Week is thick with content -- just make it a little easier for people to find related information.

Assess My Content
Is my content heavy in one vertical? Weak in another? Which stories are beneficial to my key advertisers? How can my content help businesses make better decisions? After doing a census, I'd look at ways to monetize that content through licensed reprints, targetted advertising, business search.

Churn My Subscribers
As subscriptions lapse, don't renew them -- at least not the print version. If it costs $40 million dollars to service subscribers -- and lord knows the costs for billing, circulation, marketing, and all the internal support for all those staffers ... scaling back to deliver only digital may be the most sane thing to do.

Would that all of this fix all the problems at Business Week? Possibly. Somehow a day late and a dollar short comes to mind.