Redefining value: The reasons why Credit Strategy has changed

After reviewing how we create print and online content and crucially, what we deliver, we’ve made significant changes to our print product, our range of online materials and subscription structure.

We’ve reorganised how we operate so that by the most efficient process and across multiple platforms, we create exclusive, insightful, discerning content. Like other publishers, we’ve reoriented where we place our emphasis to enhance the inherent value of news, analysis, CS interviews and features we create each day.

Value is the operative word here. Within a subset of its definitions within the Oxford Dictionary is one that pertains to something with “material or monetary worth”.

Herein lies the perpetual challenge for media companies amid the proliferation of largely meaningless, inane and often fictional online content: How do you remind readers of the monetary value of what you produce?

The internet inadvertently let the genie out of the bottle – everything was available for free and for a while the monetary value of even the most cerebral journalism was nearly forgotten – but not lost.

One way to redress this imbalance is to realign resource to ensure sufficient time and energy is invested in ensuring the content produced is consistently valuable.

Another is to remind readers of the difference between conveyor-belt produced articles and those written by journalists. Journalism is a profession. Like other professions, it requires training, two sets of qualifications and experience. It also involves an extensive curation, research, verification and refinement process for everything that’s published. That’s the process we undertake for all articles for this magazine.

So in short, at Credit Strategy, we’ve done both – reorganised what we produce, how we produce it, and re-emphasised the journalistic skills deployed to create it. But anyway, by now I should have got to the point.

So what’s changed?

We’ve created The Credit Club - a new membership structure for readers covering print and online content. There are two membership levels – Standard and Premium.

‘Standard’ provides free access to certain website articles, including news, but not a magazine subscription. ‘Premium’ grants access to swathes of online content such as exclusive CS interviews with CROs, the FCA and other regulators, opinions, features and other new sections launched, plus a magazine subscription.

New online sections include Credit 500 survey results, Bank NPL analyses and The Knowledge Hub – where you can view presentation slides from our conferences and listen to webinars. The Knowledge Hub features written answers, provided by our conference speakers, to delegates’ questions that we ran out of time for during our events.

We will also be rationalising the frequency of magazines we publish each year and instead, at times, will create ‘best practice’ reports based on winning entries to our awards programmes.

All this content is produced via journalistic endeavour, differentiating the results from scores of websites spreading mediocrity. While as a reader, you’re the ultimate judge, it follows that giving access to our content requires a commercial exchange. This is the natural evolution; it’s the norm across national newspaper websites.