One of the many ironies of the media business is that media people are particularly bad at staying on message and managing their image. This probably stems from the combination of a certain unselfconscious myopia, a level of comfort with their peers that keeps them from sticking to the script, and a gossipy egotism that overrides self-censorship.
Consider the launch of the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Since Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek late last year, there has been a steady stream of carping from various factions inside and outside the company.
As Norman Pearlstine's new team"”let's call them the Committee To Save BusinessWeek"”of Josh Tyrangiel, Eric Pooley, and Hugo Lindgren hammered away at retooling the magazine and Web site, complaints came from all corners. Tyrangiel was too aloof; the cuts to BW's staff were too deep; Bloomberg's editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler wasn't happy with the magazine writers and their preference for style over facts (which is funny if you are at all familiar with BW's house style).
Last week, coinciding with the relaunch of the magazine, Stephanie Clifford recapitulated all of these themes in her New York Times story. She captured the conflicting voices, pitting just-the-facts Bloomberg writers against the self-important glamour-pusses, which was really a dig at the Time, Inc./New York magazine vets, not the last few remaining BusinessWeek stalwarts.
According to the Times, the various factions at BBW seem to be pursuing mutually incompatible goals. The business side wants a marketing vehicle for the lucrative Bloomberg brand and the terminal business. The authoritarian Bloomberg culture wants to crush expensive, footloose creativity within the armature of its strict rules. (Office behavior and copy style must follow the rules!) The team at the top was so divided, in Clifford's telling, that BBW's editor was portrayed more as minister plenipotentiary than head of state.
With all of this noise surrounding the magazine, it's remarkable to open up a fat copy of the new issue and discover that the Committee To Save BusinessWeek has not produced a camel. To much surprise, they've built a swift quarter-horse.
Only time will tell if the magazine has real legs. For now, Bloomberg BusinessWeek is a synthesis of both sides. The magazine works not because it has resolved any of the tensions described in the Times article but because it has done an end run around them. Instead of choosing between data and narrative, BBW gives us both. With six or eight different sections (it depends how you count), the magazine is a house of many mansions, each with its own objectives, logic, and style.
The first two issues of Bloomberg BusinessWeek are a veritable Sears catalogue of business news serving each of its core constituencies. From the Bloomberg side, it presents some of the site's content in a new context, helping buy-side types and traders learn more about their context of their bets.
For the BusinessWeek reader, there's easier access to a broader range of information from around the world, with a level of detail and specificity that would satisfy any middle manager on the make.
BBW makes the most of its upfront stories with punchy, memorable shorts on companies, like Roben Farzad's excellent piece from the debut issue on the unnecessary $35 million in interest payments the New York Times has to pay. They've even squeezed in Bloomberg's broadcast assets, with interview excerpts from Charlie Rose (who records his show from Bloomberg's studio) and radio host Tom Keene.
On top of all that, the magazine has a feature well that combines some of the best attributes of what BusinessWeek did well, while reviving the kinds of narrative features that made Fortune a standout (and that, for some reason, Fortune has moved away from).
Karl Taro Greenfield's profile of Meg Whitman on the campaign trail for California's gubernatorial election is prime example, as were the stories about the French city that got into trouble with swaps and the Israeli natural gas tycoon. On the BusinessWeek side, there's a solid recap of the expanding "app universe." In the second issue, we get closer to an equilibrium point with a nice mix of the Whitacre profile laid against two investigative pieces"”one on Dick Fuld's lying under oath about his Lehman pay and another about the scams of for-profit colleges. A nice feature on starchitects' cancelled projects and a whopping service piece on office chairs' effects on your back get in touch with BW's long history of singling out the importance of design in business from both a product standpoint and a productivity one.
The only weakness of the new magazine is the cover treatment. Historically, BusinessWeek was skilled at using the cover to broadcast a big message. ("The Death of Equities," "Citibank: Can This Marriage Survive?") The story that supported the cover was less essayistic than other magazine cover stories, but the packaging often had major impact. In the weeks leading up to the relaunch, the Committee To Save BusinessWeek struggled mightily to reclaim that patrimony. With clever cover lines, they made hoary business subjects like Warren Buffet and Goldman Sachs (GS) seem fresh and pressing.
Since the relaunch we've seen a lackluster Blankfein close-up, and GM's Ed Whitacre as Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian cars. Not really barn-burning stuff"”perhaps the committee has been distracted by the task of putting out a much larger and more complicated magazine.
The new design crams a huge amount of information into the magazine. The opening sections are flow from one story to the next without the usual requirements that stories fit set sizes. With a plethora of boxes, pull-outs, and deep-captioned photos, this thing is a blizzard of information. Overall, the design works well. But in their enthusiasm, the new team has added a few touches that become distractions. Stories have too many computer-like sub-heds, and the "bottom line" feature, where the story is summed up in two lines at the end, just trivializes the authors' work. Also, for design reasons, BBW puts bylines at the bottom of the story. It's not only old-fashioned, but also does the writer a disservice.
Managing all of this"”not to mention a Web site that needs to grow substantially"”is a big challenge. And here we get to the heart of what makes BBW different from previous attempts to breakthrough and transform the business media space.
The Times' Stephanie Clifford teased BBW's editor, Josh Tyrangiel, with this description: "[W]ith his rosy cheeks and bright brown eyes,' she wrote, he "seems like he should be playing stickball in 1940s Brooklyn instead of editing a business magazine." And though there is a little bit of Leo Gorcey about Tyrangiel, his leadership style and public persona represent a marked contrast to and improvement over, say, Joanne Lipman, who led Condé Nast Portfolio's failed bid to reinvent the business magazine. One reason that BBW works where Portfolio didn't is the choice of editor. Lacking the temperament of a leader"”and possessing an outsized ego on top of an ordinary intellect"”Lipman spent two excruciating years trying build a new magazine from the ground up.
In six months, Tyrangiel, largely by working in the background, coordinating constituencies, and never making the magazine a measure of his own status, has knitted together something both familiar and different. BBW's genius is in its synthesis and the way it recognizes that, in the era of electronic distribution, there is an important place for print as a platform.
But it needs to be integrated into a larger structure. Being a meaningful player in news means having multiple ways of reaching your audience, multiple ways for your reporters and writers to present their stories, and multiple genres in which to drive the news cycle. Not everyone will be able to function all these arenas. In fact, few will have the flexibility to shine in more than one.
The organization that can staff up and manage across so many different platforms, however, is the one that will win. That is not to say Bloomberg has completely cracked the nut. Its weakness in television and resistance to really using Web video is a problem. Nonetheless, Bloomberg has a huge lead with the terminals. It needs to get better exposure for its news content online. BusinessWeek.com help with that.
And its writers need more exposure in the rest of the news ecosystem to get some of the credit they deserve. Bloomberg BusinessWeek can help dramatically with that. But if the integration that the magazine achieved, at least in the first couple of issues, can spread through the rest of the organization, this may turn out to be an important milestone in the evolution of news organizations.
Read Full Article »