So now staff at the Bloomberg-acquired weekly BusinessWeek may have a slightly better view of their future. As reported on this blog on Wednesday senior executives from Bloomberg and McGraw-Hill addressed several hundred employees in their New York HQ yesterday to outline the future for the 80-year old title that has been losing up to $1 million a week.
In an article on his The Num3rati blog, veteran BusinessWeek tech reporter Stephen Baker appears to question the Bloomberg business approach to selling terminals at $20,000 a pop and how the magazine will fit.
How much can this market grow? To listen to Bloomberg execs, they make money from the boxes and invest that money in more news-gathering power, which makes the boxes even more attractive. It’s a virtuous cycle which presumably leads to continuous growth. With BusinessWeek, Bloomberg hopes to extend its brand into the wider business audience, including c-suite executives, and open up further markets for their boxes.
I don’t see it. In my experience, every continuous growth projection encounters some force that disrupts it.
And of the future of BusinessWeek, Baker said:
Yet despite the ambitions expressed at yesterday’s meeting, I’d bet that the magazine will end up serving largely as a promotional tool for the company. The real business will be online. That’s where Bloomberg 2.0 will take shape.
