When the digital news start-up Semafor began in 2022, its founders talked about reaching a vast global audience of 200 million college-educated, English-speaking people.
But their latest push is aimed at just a tiny — albeit moneyed — sliver of that: top executives.
The company said Thursday that it would start an invitation-only newsletter for chief executives, The CEO Signal, in January. It will be free but available only to the leaders of companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue.
Semafor’s newest project is the latest in a series of moves among media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Axios and Fortune, which are battling for attention inside the C-suite.
Despite a crowded marketplace, each sees an opportunity for its newsletters and events to cater to the highest echelon of corporate leaders and to tap into a lucrative world of sponsorships and subscriptions. New sources of revenue have become increasingly important for many publications in the face of a tough digital advertising market and faltering social media traffic.
“It truly is an example of the reversal of this 20-year trend in media of prioritizing scale,” said Justin Smith, the chief executive and a co-founder of Semafor. He added, “We’re really not talking about small business or midsize business but the C.E.O.s of the biggest companies in the world, which is a micromarket.”
Mr. Smith said he had realized shortly after Semafor began that its journalists and articles were “tilting our whole model, at least in the initial phase of Semafor’s existence, toward a very, very clear audience segment, which I would call the global leadership class.”
Of that group, he said, chief executives are “the most desirable from a business model and monetization perspective, and also from an editorial perspective, really quite underserved in our view.”
For The CEO Signal, which will initially be sponsored by PwC, Semafor lured away a top Financial Times editor, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.
Mr. Edgecliffe-Johnson, formerly FT’s U.S. news editor, said in an interview that other “C.E.O.-branded” media products were intended for a more junior and more aspirational audience, while his newsletter would be written directly for the top bosses.
“I can think of very few better stories than the role of the C.E.O. at this particular moment in history, where the demands on individuals are bigger than ever and they’re more confusing than ever,” he said.
Access to the newsletter will include entry to Semafor’s annual business and policy event held in Washington, the World Economy Summit. The product will expand into a podcast, videos and other events.
In September, The Wall Street Journal hired Alan Murray, a former chief executive of Fortune Media and author of its CEO Daily newsletter, to start the WSJ Leadership Institute. Mr. Murray said the institute would build on The Journal’s existing CEO Council, a paid membership network, and similar networks for chief financial officers, chief marketing officers and chief information officers. Those networks now have about 675 paying members.
A price has not yet been set for membership, but it is expected to be in line with the roughly $25,000 a year that members pay for the C-suite networks, a Dow Jones spokeswoman said.
Mr. Murray said the institute, which will also start in January, would run editorial products, such as newsletters and video projects, and heavily emphasize events and in-person networking and learning for business leaders.
“In the last five years, what’s become especially clear is the pace of change is just mind-numbing for them,” Mr. Murray said. There is a need not just for information, he said, but for “tactics and strategies for leading their organizations through this change.”
Axios, a news organization known for its emphasis on bullet-point newsletters, is also expanding into the C-suite space with $1,000-a-year membership programs.
“You have an entire professional class that feels more inundated and confused than ever, and they have the resources to pay for content or contact — events — that they find edifying,” said Jim VandeHei, the chief executive of Axios.
One Axios program, Communicators Pro, is run by Eleanor Hawkins, a communications strategist, and is aimed at chief marketing and communications officers. Another program will start in January with the journalist Sara Fischer and focus on the media industry. Mr. VandeHei and his co-founder, the political journalist Mike Allen, recently started a paid AM Executive Briefing, which gives users virtual briefings with the pair on what’s happening in the halls of power in Washington, where Axios is based.
“It’s to give context and additional layers of expertise that really is proprietary — there aren’t that many people who are in contact with C.E.O.s, tech leaders and government officials all day, every day,” Mr. VandeHei said.
Of course, these entrants are not coming to uncharted territory. Bloomberg has an empire of business newsletters, magazines and podcasts. The DealBook newsletter from The New York Times, which is free, has been running since 2001 and has about one million subscribers. Subscription-based outlets like The Information, a tech news website, tailor their offerings for industry executives.
At Fortune, the nearly 100-year-old business magazine, editors are trying to keep up with their competitors by running more events and expanding them to smaller cities around America and more international locations. Their CEO Daily newsletter has more than 140,000 subscribers.
Diane Brady, the executive director of Fortune Live Media and the editorial director of the Fortune CEO Initiative, said it was important to take advantage of the C.E.O. audience if a publication can reach it.
“In a cluttered media environment, if you have the trust and the power to convene the leaders around the world and those who are aspiring to those roles, and you can do that on a global basis, I think that’s really powerful,” she said.
On Monday, Forbes, which has been around for 107 years, opened its first private members’ club in Madrid, where the publisher plans to hold events.
“It really is going for that premium C-suite, high-net-worth audience,” said Sherry Phillips, the incoming C.E.O. of Forbes.
“We feel like there’s lots of opportunity,” she added.
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