[LINK] publishing & web & tv convergence

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Topic Pages to Be Hub of New BusinessWeek Site 
 
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
www.nytimes.com August 17, 2008 

With advertising revenue sliding, publications try a lot of things online 
to get noticed, like — pardon the jargon — verticals, aggregation, user-
generated content, popularity rankings and even something resembling 
social networks.

BusinessWeek magazine is about to introduce a site that combines some 
elements of all of the above in ways intended to capture new readers and 
funnel them into niches that will attract advertisers.

The site, called Business Exchange, is one approach to the fast-evolving 
digital world, where some news sites that experiment have rapidly expanded 
their audiences while those that do little more than post articles online 
have been left in the dust. After two years of quiet development, it will 
go public in late September, accessible through BusinessWeek’s own Web 
site (www.businessweek.com).

The core of Business Exchange is hundreds of topic pages, on subjects as 
broad as the housing market and as narrow as the Boeing 787. Plans call 
for the number of topic pages to grow quickly into the thousands. (The 
first one created, which may or may not be in the public version of 
Business Exchange, was “BlackBerry vs iPhone.”)

A few other magazines and newspapers have also become serious about 
building verticals, but they tend to jealously guard control of their 
online audiences and content. Not this one.

Each Business Exchange topic page links to articles and blog posts from 
myriad other sources, including BusinessWeek’s competitors, with the 
contents updated automatically by a Web crawler. Nearly all traditional 
news organizations offer only their own material, spurning the role of 
aggregator as an invitation to readers to leave their sites.

On Business Exchange, a user can post new material to a topic page, or 
even create a new page, choosing the subject and the title, and write a 
brief introductory description. This is hardly a revolutionary idea in the 
wiki era, but for a mainstream publication, it represents a significant 
loosening of control. (But not too loose — new topics require editorial 
approval, promised within 24 hours, and objectionable posts will be taken 
down.)

“As journalists, we’re good at finding great sources of information and 
distinguishing what’s important, but we also want to harness the very 
significant capabilities of our community,” said Stephen J. Adler, editor 
in chief of BusinessWeek, which is published by the McGraw-Hill 
Companies. “It only takes a very small percentage of people being active 
in a topic for it to be really vibrant and valuable for everybody else.”

The site also works as a kind of social network, letting friends, 
colleagues and rivals track one another’s interests — or, say, Warren 
Buffett’s interests, if he chooses to play along.

Each user has a profile (photo optional) that contains a personal 
description and tracks the user’s reading and posting habits. It allows 
the reader to create a network among other readers, and to import 
information from a LinkedIn account.

The user can also choose to make the profile public, with all of that 
information visible to anyone on the site.

Through the topic pages and profiles, BusinessWeek hopes to be able to 
deliver narrowly focused audiences to narrowly focused advertisers, and 
even let the advertisers know who those readers are.

“Advertisers want you to prove engagement,” said Keith Fox, president of 
BusinessWeek. “Ordinary social media are too broad to draw ads, but we can 
sell display ads reaching a specific audience on electronics or cars or 
medical devices.”

BusinessWeek wants to stand out in a crowded lineup of news sources on 
businesses, financial markets, the economy, and personal finance and 
investing.

In print, BusinessWeek has a circulation of about 900,000, similar to 
Forbes and Fortune, which publish half as often. (The other top-selling 
financial magazines, like Money, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Smart 
Money, Fast Company and Inc., do not compete as directly. They are all 
monthlies, some focus primarily on personal finance, and they tend to have 
fewer ads or online readers.)

In both print ad sales and online traffic, BusinessWeek ranks far ahead of 
most other financial magazines, but lags behind its closest competitors. 
Its Web site draws more than three million unique visitors monthly, 
according to Nielsen Online, a healthy figure, but Forbes.com gets more 
than eight million. No directly comparable figure is available for Forbes, 
whose online presence is contained within Time Warner’s CNNMoney site, 
with more than nine million monthly users.

In the first six months of 2008, BusinessWeek had more than 900 ad pages, 
according to the Magazine Publishers Association, while Fortune had more 
than 1,100 and Forbes more than 1,300. Though print sales have held 
steady, financial magazines have lost more than 20 percent of their print 
ad volume in the last four years, and BusinessWeek’s advertising has 
fallen even faster.

Roger W. Neal, senior vice president and general manager of BusinessWeek 
Digital, said that as Business Exchange pages work their way up through 
search engine results, the site should double BusinessWeek’s traffic on 
the Web within two years, allowing it to sell more ads.

“Increasingly the ad buy in our sector is going to that top tranche of 
players,” he said, “so we want to get dramatically bigger.”
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Cheers people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria Australia




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