Torstar partners with Wall Street Journal
Star Business Journal will provide selection of WSJ articles
The Toronto Star is re-launching its business pages as the Star Business Journal, featuring exclusive access to international business news from the Wall Street Journal.
Starting Tuesday, print and online readers of the Star and thestar.com will receive a selection of Wall Street Journal articles, building on the Toronto Star’s local business coverage.
The Star Business Journal on thestar.com will initially carry a sample of articles from The Wall Street Journal, with emphasis on economy, financial markets, business and technology. Later, as part of a premium digital subscription package, customers will be offered fuller access to a much larger number of stories.
It’s a move designed to attract established and aspiring business leaders, said Toronto Star publisher John Boynton. He spoke to the Star about the firstof-its-kind partnership. Here is an edited version of that interview. Why the Wall Street Journal? What is the Star Business Journal? Can you set it up for us? It’s an initiative between The Wall Street Journal and our- selves. We’re taking two world class organizations — the Toronto Star and TorStar’s other dailies — known for great local reporting, investigative reporting, very strong brands — and we’re partnering with them specifically on business content, and adding that to our own business content to provide a much more robust set of combined business content for our customers.
What’s the data that supports this?
There’s a large group of customers out there. We have our priority customers that we’re going after, that we really want to surprise and delight and make as satisfied as we can with our service.
A couple of those segments are very interested in business news. It’s very clear to us in the data that in order to earn those people subscribing to your news you have to have a robust business section. Will the Star Business Journal be using mostly economic and financial Wall Street Journal coverage – because as you mentioned the WSJ provides a range of subjects?
Yes, they cover tech. They have a very good tech section. They cover markets, global markets; they cover business in general, they cover finance. But they also are very good at specializing in some specific func- tional things. They have a whole plethora of content just for people in the IT industry, people in the marketing industry, people in the finance industry, people in the procurement industry — and then they also have very deep coverage of certain sectors.
Those sectors that would be highly interesting to Canadians would be the financial sector, oil and gas sector, natural resource sector and the technology sector.
Whether you look at it vertically or horizontally, it’s very, very deep coverage.
Are we trying to be the paper that is read on Bay Street?
We don’t see it that way. In terms of our local coverage and our investigative reporting the Star brand specifically adheres to the Atkinson principles. Business content tends to be for people who are in business, thinking about business. It’s very compartmentalized that way in people’s brains. What I would say is we’re going to try and do the best job at both of those things.
I don’t mean to exaggerate or create a caricature of a Canadian, but if you think of the average Canadian, one thing that’s true is we tend to be more socially progressive but still somewhat fiscally accountable and responsible.
We’re not all the way over here and we’re not all the way over there. We’re complex people, Canadians, and we think very differently.
It would be a big mistake to think Canadian business people aren’t socially progressive. I think that’s our fibre, that’s our DNA, that’s our history.
The Star’s business section is being rebranded. Will there be other sections you are going to look at rebranding?
This is the one we know of in the short-term. I would call it more of a relaunch. We’re relaunching it. There’s a little bit of a look and feel that’s a little bit different and that’s to get people’s attention and say, ‘This is new, pay attention, this is worth your time, we want to earn your trust.’ That’s not to say that we won’t look at other parts of the content we deliver right around Torstar Group and think whether there’s other opportunities. Do you read the WSJ yourself? Are you a subscriber and for how long?
Yes. They have actually a whole section just for chief marketing officers, including a newsletter and a whole part of the website. Most of the folks that I know that came up through the marketing world think very highly of that particular content.
My understanding is that this is to drive subscriptions down the road. How does this do that?
This will be part of our subscription package. We have a trial period between now and the time we launch subscriptions and this will be bundled in with it. Do you have anything you want to tell readers?
It’s important for people who come see us on Tuesday, whether it’s in print or online, that they remember for a little while we’re just doing what we call a sampling or a trial and it’s a very small subset of the content we’re going to have when we have subscriptions. When we launch this with subscription, it’s reasonable to say it’s almost all of The Wall Street Journal’s business, technology and marketing content. There will be more than we can possibly use and more than any reader can probably absorb. But we’ll have something for everybody.
But I don’t want people to confuse what we have for the trial period, which is a sampling, and what we’re going to have for the (subscription) launch.