Battle of the business dailies

Economia publishing house's SMS screw-up last week came at a particularly bad time. The iHNed server accidentally sent a test SMS that said, in Czech, that "Paroubek shit himself." It came as Mladá fronta publisher is reportedly preparing to launch a new business daily to compete against Economia's HN. The only way a new daily can catch on is by being more serious than HN. That not only means no scatological SMSes, but also distinguishing consistently between net and pretax profit and realizing that Kč 27.7 is not the same as Kč 27.700. To maintain its circulation, HN has gone down-market. It devoted a full page today to Vladimír Železný when two paragraphs would have sufficed, and it missed the huge story about imposing health tax on company board members. Czech business is moving at a rapid pace, and businesspeople will buy the economic daily that keeps up with them.