A few years ago, BusinessWeek’s Steve Baker and I sat over coffee concocting a scheme to create a crowd-sourced, wiki-based, curated effort to get the magazine’s readers to fix General Motors. Oh, if only we’d done it, BW’s crowd might have saved us taxpayers billions.
Well, now, BusinessWeek is for sale and whoever gets it – it is a valuable franchise with a very valuable and wise crowd – will need to reinvent it. I was going to suggest that the magazine do for itself what we were thinking of doing for GM. But Steve beat me to it.
Steve also contemplates what he calls the “last 5%” of a magazine’s process that picks every nit and sands and polishes. It’s the magazine way, especially among weeklies in America, and though I saw improvements from it, it also drove me nuts when I worked in it. “This last 5% consumes a sizeable effort and expense< " Steve says. "The question the next (or current) owner of BusinessWeek is going to have to grapple with is whether such attention to detail is worth it, or, alternatively, whether there's another way to achieve the same goal."
The assumption behind that last 5% is that there's perfection to be reached: a right way to tell this story. I don't think that's true. But there is value to be added in the last - what? - 20% of effort: adding reporting, answering questions, adding perspective, giving context, and - as Steve points out - trimming out repetition and excess, adding efficiency for the reader. That's the value that journalists can add. But how much is too much? Says Steve:
But my problem with the 5% process has to do with insularity. Much of the analysis has to do with a team of people in a midtown skyscraper imagining what “the reader” knows and wants to know. With blogs, we now have the tools to ask. But the business model calls for secrecy. So instead of asking, we imagine. Our discussions involve conflicting interpretations of what is going on inside of the reader’s head. . . .The entire discussion is based on the one-size-fits-all paradigm of the industrial age. It’s got (at least) two problems: First, it’s expensive. Second, readers are seeing in rest of their lives, from TiVo to their double-shot half-skim half-caf latte that one size doesn’t have to fit all. Even dogs these days are built to order. In this world, many business readers want and expect customization.
BusinessWeek has been trying to bring that customization – its mass of niches – with its Business Exchange, where readers and journalists curate topics. At Aspen, the magazine’s editor, Steve Adler, told me that advertisers also prefer it because BX provides targeting and relevance.
Steve starts the discussion about the next BW speculating on how communities and algorithms can help do what BW has done.
PaidContent also curates others’ suggestions for the new BW here.
I think the future BW revolves around its wise crowd: more than 900,000 people who know business, so how do we get to know what they know? More later.
What would you do with BusinessWeek?
: Note that Fortune, too, is remaking itself.
A thought on the “last 5%”–besides expense and effort, it also introduces a lot of delay. Not a problem in the pre-real-time-Internet days, but a terrible disadvantage now.
[...] Reinventing BusinessWeek… BuzzMachine [...]
Interestingly, I am a very web saavy business news consumer who has cut the daily newspaper, but I remain a subscriber to Business Week and Fortune. It is for me, more about the analysis than the “news.”
Interesting that you bring up the 5% theory on the same day as aversion to mistakes and failure because despite all that expensive 5% effort, everyone who’s worked in magazines knows that mistakes will always get through. I remember being called on the carpet by publishers to explain how we got the location of Company X’s headquarters wrong or some similar error. When my explanation was a variation on “Shit Happens,” I was none too popular. The funny thing was readers never seemed to mind if you just owned up to the mistake.
Since it is ‘BusinessWeek,’ and objective journalism seems dead, one idea would be to give at least 2 sides to each business story.
Another idea would be to actually laud business; ideas, ethics, new org charts, trends, etc. You know, measurable, tactical, helpful content for the business person.
[...] Reinventing Business Week Jeff Jarvis (tags: Business_Week Business_Model Magazines) [...]
Business Week should consider focusing more on journalism and less on self-publishing. Consider combining online with existing non-business national news media and becoming their “business section.” Consolidated distribution is the key to building audiences large enough to effectively and efficiently monetize.
bob wyman
That’s true. BusinessWeek needs to find ways to introduce customization for its wise crowd
It’s been BusinessWeak for far too long. It also seemed to be a biusiness magazine written by people who despise business. Kind of like The Guardian’s (and NYT’s) business sections.
I’m shocked that anyone would keep the BW sub for the analysis, but then RonK is keeping Fortune too, so I guess our definitions of analysis are different. The mag has been very Time ish – written at a grade 2 level for those who are shocked that Porter or bonds exist.
As someone who has despised their coverage for years, I’m very happy seeing them being flogged for a dollar. Would have preferred all the writers and editors being forced into indentured servitude in a Burmese mine, but the death of the brand is a decent second best option.
Any comments on FT editor’s proclamation that “everyone” will be charging for content in 12 months?
A really novel approach might be to get some insight from a handful of business school grads – instead of relying on their Columbia University School of Journalism types – a basic explanation of the upside of free-market capitalism might just sell a few subscriptions.
[...] Reinventing BusinessWeek (BuzzMachine) [...]
[...] Vision Thing and the Crowd Thing I was reading Jeff Jarvis’ post reacting to the news that BusinessWeek is up for sale, and it got me thinking. It seems to me [...]
Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week are all doing poorly; The Economist isn’t, but only their Business section overlaps; and even that section is more global than any of the others.
I think what ails these magazines is that they’ve failed to evolve. The web has evolved into niche content. I read TechCrunch to get my daily tech news, Science Daily to get my science fix, and Infectious Greed to get my finance drivel. (I read many more, but this sampling should suffice). What each of these gives me is a real-time, in-depth (sometimes at least) analysis of events from a unique (read: you know where the author is coming from) perspective.
The magazines give me a sanitized view, which ends up being a rather drab, delayed summary of events.
Interestingly, the Economist which is still doing comparatively well, doesn’t aim to provide an ‘objective’ view … I often find myself in total agreement with the author … can you think of a better way to get someone to keep reading your content? (Yes, I disagree a lot too, but I still read it.)
The truth is that all news is subjective, every person interprets events differently, by trying to report ‘objectively’, you lose lessen the appeal.
Jeff, do you think you’d have even 1/2 the readership you do, if you were providing us with drab objective updates on the “service challenges you encountered after your purchase of a Dell computer”?
[...] Jeff Jarvis however, this seems to me to be quite an asset and something that could and should be fixed or in another [...]