Varied factors account for the success or otherwise of every business, Western Publications Limited, publishers of DAILY GUIDE not an exemption.
The journey to DAILY GUIDE’s position, as the second largest circulating daily and leader in the private newspaper segment, is checkered and goes back close to three decades: this notwithstanding, managers of the company have applied strict business modules and ethics to remain afloat.
The inclement economic conditions have threatened the survivability of the newspaper industry, as it has other business entities even as our helmsmen hold on to the steer.
Spanners have been thrown into our works through deliberate denial of advertisements from state institutions in favor of their most preferred option.
Although the media terrain and the nature of advertisement flow from state institutions have witnessed a slight improvement somewhat, it nonetheless constitutes a minuscule source of the paper’s revenue.
The cover price remains the major source of revenue for DAILY GUIDE when advertisements should have been the source of this lifeline in the ideal setting.
In recent times, the operations of our Marketing and Advertisement Department have been reconfigured as a means of containing the difficult times and ensuring a total business orientation of DAILY GUIDE especially in the face of insufficient advertisements.
This has been misinterpreted rather mischievously by persons who are refusing to understand the nuances of growing businesses, or who have no business knowledge on how to contain the peculiar challenges of the Ghanaian business milieu.
We have successfully separated our business development segment from the editorial department, the former given the mandate to do the needful to meet its revenue target which the company uses to support its nationwide network of employees. Whilst large financial institutions and telecom giants have been forced to layoff workers, DAILY GUIDE has held fast in the face of the current declining economic landscape.
Those who peddle misinformation about our business management modules hardly understand the disparity between a business entity such as DAILY GUIDE and mouthpieces of political parties that produce some 400 copies of propaganda newsletters daily and depend, of course, on funding from a central source for survival.
They can be discriminatory as to which client’s advertisement should be accepted or not, if and when such opportunities come their way at all.
With the heating of the political campaigns since June specifically, both the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) have advertised their messages, as it were on our pages, each of them paying the prescribed charges. Unfortunately the latter’s purchase of space for their campaigns have triggered a flurry of accusations and verbal attacks against us, some of them bereft of decency.
Our editorial policy and direction remains consistent though. Interfering with the now enhanced business department in its bid to keep the company from folding up through such directives as to which advertisements to reject or accept do not only make little business sense but sound silly.
Ours is a product being offered for sale to all who wish to purchase, independent of affiliation or creed. So far the two leading parties have taken the business offer to put across their messages to their compatriots through our channel; it is clearly due to our countrywide reach which provides a clear leverage.
We are journalists running a standard newspaper, which is an indisputable fact and would continue to operate as such.
We seek to continue to serve the cause of our country, democracy, freedom of the press and humanity, and so we find it regrettable that this would be misconstrued for deliberate approval of the programmes of one political party to the detriment of the other.
Let’s be courteous in putting across our concerns, especially when these are about matters we do not have sufficient knowledge of, or have cared to consider judiciously.