Blog: Personnel Today goes ‘online-only’

Launched 21 years ago, today sees the last issue of Reed Business Information’s Personnel Today magazine.  The announcement from RBI mentions there’ll be a net loss of 8 jobs (with 12 leaving from the print team and 4 new online posts being created – presumably with 4 people being repurposed into the online team) as the title goes ‘online-only’.  As Adam Tinworth of RBI points out in his One Man and His Blog blog, this gives RBI a chance to forget about the cannibalising effect on print advertising of online sales efforts, to focus on www.personneltoday.com; alongside its continuing face to face awards and events activities.

What will be hard, will be not to let the loss of the 8 people knock too much stuffing out of the business; and crucially to quickly kickstart the right sort of commercial conversations with advertising clients.  Online is a more complex sale and requires new headsets for the sales teams: clients want innovative solutions that deliver results.  In our experience only some sales people can make the switch, and overall, margins will be under pressure (although of course RBI has the benefit of not having to publish a magazine every week).

There is an inevitability to these transitions; magazines lie unopened in their wrappers on desks, advertisers want to get much closer to readers, and recruitment has moved online in most professional sectors now; and whilst this was maintained for some time by public sector recruiters, that is sure to change this year.  Some people tell me that senior partners at law firms still like their job ads to be seen in print – but logic says that (if this is really true) this can’t continue for very much longer.

12 years ago at the first talk I gave in the early days of Sift to the ICAEW’s IT Faculty Annual Conference, I confidently asserted that I could see a time when Accountancy Age (one of the then two leading print titles for accounting professionals) would close in favour of Internet vehicles such as Sift’s AccountingWEB.  Accountancy Age is still going in print (albeit a shadow of its former self at 24 pages), and is now one element of the range of Accountancy Age activities that includes webinars and awards; but as a weekly print publication its days must be numbered.

There’s been a number of other titles go the same way over the last few years.  Some publishers have merged print titles into online sites, others have been quietly shelved.

Where we end up of course is the new playing field of online and Face to Face.  My view is that the key requirements for the winning B2B publishers in this new world are:

• A portfolio of titles (so that clients can be given a comprehensive range of solutions, and sales efforts leveraged across multiple verticals);
• A focus on engagement as the most relevant metric (as an engaged audience is the only one that’ll respond to ads); and
• An ability to deliver innovative results-based solutions for advertisers (which as I said earlier, requires a new headset for the sales team).

The biggest challenge for RBI and others moving in this direction, won’t actually be generating engagement with the audience, but on the commercial side – creating innovative solutions for advertisers, each of whom want something that’s never been done before that also delivers results.  This requires considerably more skills that those required in print; and by no means all sales people can make the switch.

Of course, subscription models will also have their role to play in some areas and for some verticals, but advertising will still play a primary role as the core competency of B2B publishers is connecting advertisers and business professionals.

Welcome to the new online-only playing field RBI!

[Full disclosure, Sift’s online community HR Zone competes with Personnel Today.]