An article in today’s New York Times, Business is a beat deflated, by the paper’s media critic David Carr suggests the business press as we’ve known it – Forbes, BusinessWeek et al – has fallen on hard times and isn’t getting back up again any time soon, if ever.
Forbes just announced yet another layoff. Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek from McGraw Hill for a song. Fortune’s scaling back the number of issues it will produce next year. The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau. Advertising in other business publications has fallen precipitously. Carr suggests that a lot of what passed for business journalism was aspirational in nature, showing would-be captains of industry the prescribed formula to follow if they wanted to be the next Wall Street millionaire. Now that the mighty have fallen, he reasons, people have stopped caring about the the publications that praised them.
While I buy into the fact that the print business press has suffered what might be a fatal blow, it’s not the end of the world for business reporting.
For every Forbes or BusinessWeek that’s downsizing or sold, new publications are popping up online. New entities might not have the gravitas of the old ones. But they don’t have the overhead either. That might be bad in the short run – not as much money equals not as many resources to do investigative pieces or go after the important stories of the day. But at least they’ve got a better shot at living to see another day.
Some of these new publications aren’t really new. One of the best business stories of the year was The Giant Pool of Money, a listener-friendly take on how we got into the present economic mess in the first place, that was a collaboration between NPR and American Public Media’s quirky radio show This American Life. It was such a hit NPR is now teaming up with local public broadcasters on EconomyStory.org, a website that will showcase all the parties’ economy-related reporting.
Other new outlets for business news are starting up all the time. Two I’m acquainted with because I’ve done some work for them: MoneyWatch.com, created by CBS earlier this year, and a still in beta start-up on personal finance for women.
The old guard of online business news, sites such as MarketWatch.com, The Street, The Motley Fool and CNNMoney are still going strong, as are newer outfits such as VentureBeat and The Business Insider.
So, while some of the big glossies might be fading into the sunset, the genre can hardly be said to be dying.
If you cover business, where’s your work coming from these days?
I sure hope Business Week thrives, Michelle. They do some wonderful investigative reporting. Along with The New Yorker, they’re desert island reading for me.