So what can you expect from the Bloomberg version of Business Week?
It’s official. Michael Bloomberg has bought the venerable, eight decade old Business Week for the pocket-change amount of $5 million (less than the price of a good condo in New York). Of course, as perhaps the best business weekly in America — in fact, one of the best business news sources behind The Financial Times and Bloomberg’s own news service. As we’ve watched the Wall Street Journal steadily decline in quality since Mr. Murdoch got his slimy hands on it, what can we expect of the new “Bloomberg Business Week,” as the weekly will now be called?
The surprise — and radically anti-Murdoch — strategy is to improve the editorial quality of the magazine, which is already quite high.
Money quote:
To energize and improve BusinessWeek’s editorial product, then, the new owners plan to increase the number of editorial pages in every issue, tapping Bloomberg’s 2,200 existing journalists.
“We think that given the global reach and assets available to us at Bloomberg, combined with BusinessWeek, we can just put out a great magazine,” Mr. Pearlstine said in an interview Tuesday night. “If we do that, we will be rewarded with consumer demand and advertising will follow.”
Our book, The Startup Bible has a one or two page discussion of news sources that every entrepreneur should regularly consult. We’re considering removing The Wall Street Journal in the second edition, but that would be a bit too premature and a walloping bit too idiosyncratic. But we praise Business Week to the skies and we’re hoping, with this radically new focus on increasing and improving the editorial, that Bloomberg creates a world-class product that becomes the model for beleaguered news media everywhere.
What a radical idea. How do you get news customers back? By improving the product. Go figure.
The alternative, I shudder to think, is a news universe filled with Glenn Becks, Nikki Finkes, and Arianna Huffingtons.
