So long Editor and Publisher? Don’t bet on it

So long Editor and Publisher after 100 years – or so it would seem.

But if Press Gazette’s recent history is anything to go by this isn’t the end for our US equivalent, or even the beginning of the end…

Lke E&P, Press Gazette has had a tough few years as it has fought to adapt to a world where low-cost jobs notice boards with minimal editorial expenditure have taken our classified advertising revenues and where media news is free and liberally available elsewhere.

Now’s not the time to recount the rollercoaster of ups, downs, awards boycotts, closures, buyouts, relaunches and 11th hour rescues that have followed since Press Gazette was bought by Matthew Freud and Piers Morgan in 2004 following the break-up of Quantum Business Media.

But the bottom line is that Press Gazette has persevered because its audience is an incredibly powerful and influential one.

The PR industry spends billions trying to get to journalists – it just takes Press Gazette to capture a small slice of that market for it be a highly profitable magazine. And there are already signs that we are doing that with our monthly sponsored Reporter’s Guides.

I’m not intimate with Editor and Publisher’s circulation figures. But even if it was only read by the editors, publishers and chief executives of the USA’s top ten biggest selling newspapers – which I’m sure it is – that is potentially an incredibly lucrative audience.

I’m as sure as I can be that Paul Dacre, Dominic Mohan and James Murdoch read Press Gazette every month. What price can you put on a few minutes of eyeball time with that trio?

Nielsen has closed Editor and Publisher because it’s a publishing business which caters for a contracting industry. It’s therefore a disproportionate drain on the time of executives as they struggle to find new revenue streams when in difficult economic times they’d much rather concentrate on the easy wins.

It almost goes without saying that at such a time of economic and technological upheaval for the news industry – it is more important than ever that US journalists have their own journal and website (independent from gung-ho new media true-believers like Jeff Jarvis).

It’s important, worthwhile and potentially very lucrative. Surely there must be a publisher out there willing to take on the E&P challenge. I’d put money on it that there is.