I
In 1997, the Financial Post got a new publisher who had previously been head of
advertising sales.
Rooting through readership studies, he noted that some 80%-plus of Post readers
had an interest in sports, so he decided we should have a large Saturday Sports section,
although we had no sports staff.
(He might have also surmised that 90% of our readers liked sex.
More potential for weekend treatment?)
His sports brain child was being pitched to advertisers when I
(who was managing editor of the paper)
was asked to sit in on a progress meeting.
This was the first I’d heard of the new section.
Inevitably,I asked where we might get editorial material to put around all the ads.
Simple, said the publisher.
We just take a bunch of Toronto Sun sports stories (the Sun owned the Post)
from the previous week and run them. Voila!
Well, said I, if you read the stories and the columns from the Sun
you will realize that almost all of them are about the game played last night
or the game to be played tonight.
Very little will stand up for weekend reading.
The publisher was astounded. He didn’t believe me,
so I offered to look through two months of Sun sports to see what might stand up
for a weekend read. I counted five such stories.
Five articles in 60 days of Suns.
How this would play out we never knew.
Within a few weeks Conrad Black (through Southam/Hollinger)
bought the Post and that sports section
and whatever else was to follow died on the vine.
If only other such nonsense could be dealt with so expeditiously.
Next: The myth of the Business Leader.
Next: The myth of the Business Leader.
