| Abstract |
"Print
will be dead in 10 years," so said Marjorie Scardino, then CEO of
The Economist Group (now CEO of the Pearson media group), in the early 1990s.
She was not entirely right, yet not entirely wrong either. The last decade — the
decade of the digital economy, despite its exaggerated promises and threats
(to print-based organisations, at least) — has seen print publishers such
as the Economist Intelligence Unit, a division of The Economist Group that
focuses on country analysis, redefining both how we deliver our content,
and to a great extent what content we generate and how we generate it. Almost
80% of the Economist Intelligence Unit's content provision, indeed
80% of our business, is now via electronic (Internet) delivery, and just
20% remains in print — a radical transformation from ten, even five, years
ago.
The transformation has not been without its risks and difficulties. The
risk to revenue and thus to income, of course, was high: would clients switch
in sufficient numbers, and sufficiently quickly, to new online services
as we assumed, and bear out the risks taken — the large investments in
online technology, editorial and otherwise. To what extent would new clients
be attracted, especially in Asia where initial expectations were of a slow
pick-up in electronic subscriptions? How long would revenue likely decline,
before it began to rise again? Would new electronic content cannibalise
old content irrevocably?
Becoming a full electronic publisher would have tremendous implications
for editorial, too. To what extent, and how quickly, should editorial move
from old-line printing to publishing for — and from — a database?
What kind of products would integrate best into the new system; which needed
to go? What effect would Internet functionality, ease of access and the
rise of electronic competition have on the frequency of updating our core
products — should we move from quarterly to dynamic updating? Would customisation
become a feature of our work? How far would we need to re-invent editorial
operations — and most importantly EIU's editorial culture — to
focus on being an electronic publisher?
This presentation is a case study of how one medium-sized media organisation
applied itself to these challenges and opportunities, and how it managed
to come through.
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