The new business website set up by former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves has revealed it has nearly hit its first-year readership target after just three months.

Marc launched TheBusinessDesk.com’s West Midlands portal in February after leaving the Post editorship at Christmas.

The site had a target of 5,000 registered users in its first year, but Marc has now revealed it signed-up 4,500 of them in the first three months of operation.

Its success earned the three-man BusinessDesk.com team a glowing write-up on page three of yesterday’s Financial Times which poetically described them as “three Brummies in a broom cupboard trying to raise local journalism from its deathbed.”

Earlier this week Marc sparked a lively debate over the future of the newspaper industry with a blog post that will be the basis for a speech to the West Midlands CBI tomorrow.

In it he claimed that the regional newspaper industry had shown itself to be “structurally incapable” of responding to the challenge posed by the internet, and claimed low-cost media businesses such as his own were the way forward for journalism.

Douglas McCabe, a publishing analyst at London-based Enders Analysis, shares his view.

He told the FT: “A lot more businesses like this will pop up. Newspapers will be faced with many tiny competitors with very small costs.”

Comments

hilary (09/06/2010 12:33:56)
The three Brummies in a broom cupboard may be raising local journalism from its deathbed – but only business journalism. They’re not interested in planning decisions, crime, court or the rest of local news because there ain’t no advertising in it and because it still requires more bodies. So if this is the future of local journalism, God help us!

Mark (10/06/2010 09:37:38)
Local journalism isn’t on its deathbed. You have to remember that even in its weekly newspaper state, the Birmingham Post employs more journalists than businessdesk.com and is less reliant on packing up press releases. Hilary is wrong to say there’s no advertising in other areas of content, because increasingly advertisers want an audience which is local to an area, not just a big number. The sort of stories Hilary mentions are just the sort of stories which appeal to that audience. As for quoting Enders Analysis, that’s like getting the man at the corner of the bar who will always tell you we’re all doomed to offer a comment, in which he says: ‘We’re all doomed.’

Old Timer (10/06/2010 09:42:07)
What is the value of a registered user? If they are returning regularly to read content and opening up daily newsletters every day then great, but the best figures, which I suspect Marc wouldn’t release, would be returning visitors and click throughs from the newsletter. A lot of smoke and mirrors going on here, especially as 4,500 is much higher than the figure Marc was quoting on Twitter a fortnight ago. Still, good to see that he’s taken some old tricks from his old job to his new web world

Thomas (14/06/2010 16:45:21)
On a completely different note, the piece once again showed how fast and loose our “estemmed national newspapers” play with the facts. Two of three journalists on TheBusinessDesk in Birmingham are not Brummies…..still, nevermind eh!!!
And Hilary, I think the reason they aren’t interested in planning decisions, crime or courts is because it’s a business news website. Hence the name….surely, that’s a giveaway, no?

Paul Linford, Editor (14/06/2010 16:51:08)
On a similar note to Thomas, I thought the FT’s description of the three of them as “refugees from the declining regional newspaper industry” was playing equally fast and loose with the facts given that one of them has just moved there from HTFP – a website that has made a profit in each of its ten years of existence!