Advertising doom hits Business Week

Paul Barrett has returned to the Wall Street Journal after only a few months after leaving the journal to manage investigative reports for Business Week.



There are rumors of yet another layoff at BW, which I believe would be the fifth in three years. I knew things were tight at the pub when they let Kathy Rebello go last year, but now they are not only cutting into the bone, but some of the bones are walking away on their own.



The cuts are in response to dropping advertising revenues. Management has been responding by cutting staff and adding "celebrity" columnists to the mix. Less information and more opinion. And the readers are responding by not reading.



Contributed articles and opinion might be a lot less costly to put into a pub, but I think we have hit a saturation point in the reading public. Readers want to know what's going on, not what pundits think. Unfortunately for the rest of us that means we're getting to the point where if we want that kind of information, we are going to have to pay for it...either to deliver it or to receive it.

Comments

  1. Brian FullerJanuary 5, 2008 at 4:39 AM

    Dang, not good news Lou and surprising too since BW represents a higher class of biz journalism (btw, the hed should read Business Week sted Wire).
    I noticed the Wall Street Journal has been devoting a lot of ink on a given day to a given topic, be it the caucus or the mortgage meltdown--not your typical main story + sidebar approach. Could be that this is the holiday period where they almost have to do this; could be that they're taking the concept of daily analysis really seriously. Let's hope!
    Happy New Year, Lou!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lou CoveyJanuary 7, 2008 at 9:41 AM

    Ooops. thanks Bri. I talk to Business Wire so much my muscle memory kicks in when typing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Loring WirbelJanuary 8, 2008 at 3:09 AM

    I mentioned in a comment in Paul Miller's blog that I sat down and did a careful "content analysis" of November-December BW issues, and concluded they had dumbed down to an appalling level. It is possible to move to shorter articles and buzzier graphics, as Scientific American has done, without losing the core of content, but BW has become very close to unreadable. And that's sad.

    ReplyDelete

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