Jornal de Negócios – Sebrae – EN
Background
Sebrae-SP is the São Paulo branch of Sebrae, Brazil’s national micro and small business support service, and the leading point of reference for entrepreneurship in the state. Its mission is to support micro and small business owners, as well as people considering starting a business, through consultancy, courses, events and publications in print and online.
In the city of São Paulo, alongside its head office, it runs six district offices (Centro, Leste I, Leste II, Norte, Oeste and Sul); across Greater São Paulo there are five more (Alto Tietê, Baixada Santista, Grande ABC, Guarulhos and Osasco); and a further 22 across the rest of the state — 33 points of contact in all, each with its own team of advisers.
For more than 25 years, the Jornal de Negócios do Sebrae-SP has been bringing business management knowledge and practical solutions to micro and small companies across São Paulo state.
Until September 2014 there was a single edition of the newspaper: 16 pages, a print run of 60,000 and free distribution. As entrepreneurship grew across the state, Sebrae-SP saw the need to refresh the publication and widen its reach.
The Jornal de Negócios do Sebrae-SP therefore moved to 24 pages and 28 customised editions, each with its own cover and articles for the region it circulated in: one for the state capital, five for Greater São Paulo and 22 for the rest of the state. To meet this new demand, the print run jumped from 60,000 to 500,000 copies a month.
The challenge
To bring in a modern, accessible register and a more popular, more effective editorial agenda capable of sustaining a new print run of 500,000 copies across 28 different versions of the same newspaper, distributed in more than 450 municipalities in São Paulo state, each carrying news from its own region — which meant, among other things, commissioning local reporting and photography in towns across the interior and Greater São Paulo.
The other major challenge was the logistics of distributing 500,000 copies. Coordinated work between the editorial team, the printers (printing and handling), Brazil’s postal service and Sebrae-SP made it possible for the newspaper to reach the mailing list — updated monthly — as well as Sebrae-SP’s regional offices. To give a sense of scale: three fully loaded articulated lorries of printed newspapers.
What made it distinctive
There is no precedent in the Brazilian press for an established print title, more than 20 years old with a loyal readership, increasing its print run more than eightfold and moving to 28 customised editions, each with news exclusive to its own region.
The effort behind a monthly newspaper of this kind was considerable, involving more than 60 editorial professionals plus another 30 people at Sebrae-SP, among them the regional office managers who contributed story ideas and colleagues from the organisation’s market intelligence team.
Award (November 2015)
The publication won gold in the B2B Newspaper category at the awards run by Anatec, Brazil’s national association of specialist and trade publishers.
