A newspaper is a public trust: The Raul Locsin legacy beyond 30
Fail our own trustworthiness, and we have nothing to commemorate today. Not freedom, not democracy, not any real economy, and certainly not a news organization that deserves thirty years.
When the MVP Group invested in BusinessWorld in 2013, Manuel V. Pangilinan gave one marching order to the editorial and business sides of Business
World: preserve the DNA of Raul Locsin. Managers on either side knew what that meant.
For the editorial people at the core of our product, it means serving no one and nothing but the credibility of our reports to which we daily stake our individual and collective names. Mr. Locsin had many basic rules for reliable reporting that Business
World’s subscribers will recognize as hallmarks of our stories to this day. These are not marketing slogans, but basics and tenets for our people, for example: No anonymous quotes, and no onesided, single-sourced stories.
To this same end, Mr. Pangilinan emphasized: If the Philippines is to aspire to be a worldclass economy, at the very least it needs a world- class business newspaper. He assured the editorial team of its independence.
At the same time, on the other side of Mr. Locsin’s legacy, Mr. Pangilinan also stressed: For
BusinessWorld to be credible, it must not only be credible in the business of news, it must credible AS a business.
New management came at a time of great upheaval and disruption in all industries, the media certainly among the most vulnerable of them. Breakneck technology, the digital revolution, and the emergence of social networks and platforms that few imagined in 1987 had wrought havoc not only on news organizations but on the very models upon which the sector was built.
Rules for distribution and reach changed by the year, by the month, and now, it feels, by the week. Where editors and marketers used to be most sensitive to audience needs and preference, they are now captives to data, analytics, and algorithms far from our control. Where we used to compete with other papers, we now compete with all media across all electronic platforms. For digital ad spends, the greatest competition is not even in our borders, but in the United States. Google and Facebook – and between them, YouTube and Instagram – corner almost 90% of digital ads. Finally, in the age of trolls and fake news, we are not even competing with other news providers anymore.
It is an overwhelming environment.
And yet, here is the little news we come to you with on BusinessWorld’s 30th anniversary: We are very much in business. We are much more in business, in fact, than we were a full decade ago. Through disruption and flux, BusinessWorld, as of 2016, has been returned to profitability, reversing a decline in readership and revenues over two digital decades that is easy to acknowledge only because the trend applied to all players and the entire industry.
We have done this, first, by being true to our product and our subscribers. BusinessWorld remains the most credible business newspaper in the Philippines. It remains that we must deliver information and insights which leaders and thinkers in both public and private sectors can confidently consider – upon which they can make decisions and act.
But equally important, we have responded as any true business should: by facing realities rather than railing against them. Over the past years we have made official and explicit the inevitable:
BusinessWorld is not a newspaper. We are a multimedia, multiplatform news and information organization. We are in digital, we are in social, we are on web, we are on mobile.
In three short years we have quadrupled our following on social media. We have tripled the hits on our web and mobile sites. We have adjusted our organization and structure around the new demands of content and new trends in reach, distribution, and engagement. We have invested in fewer but more focused and far bigger events, events being a platform unto itself. The annual BusinessWorld Economic Forum is now, far and away, the biggest business conference in the Philippines. All these while actually growing our subscription for print. Meanwhile, in all platforms digital – including social - we are already into video. By next year, our video will be on TV.
Over the past years we have also been investing very heavily on our backend. We know that
BusinessWorld is sitting on a gold mine, specifically our archives and our data. We have been cleaning up, structuring and updating that data for the past few years. In the coming months, we will be launching services that will provide real- time access services for our readers and our subscribers. BusinessWorld is no longer a “just” a newspaper, and from the days of Locsin we have never been “just” a news company. In the coming months – in the days ahead of our 30th year - we will make even more explicit and even more tangible this truth.
People can be forgiven if they forget or in fact never knew: the first Philippine news organization to have a web site, in 1994, was BusinessWorld. It was so far ahead of its time that Raul Locsin launched it with a pay wall. We have learned many lessons since. There has been one constant wisdom: We must continue to evolve, we must always innovate, but we must always do so hand- in- hand with what our readers and partners are ready for.
As we change, as we are forced to change, we know that the advertisers and sponsors are being disrupted as well. We’re all in the same boat.
We thank our loyal readers, our most sincere and demanding critics. We are grateful to our advertisers, partners, and supporters. Stay with us as we continue this journey. As always, Business
World remains open for business. Let us continue to grow together, to innovate together, and to navigate these waters together.