OLD Media Moves

Forbes on BusinessWeek, paying for online content

September 23, 2009

Jeff Bercovici of DailyFinance.com interviews Forbes CEO Steve Forbes about what’s going on at BusinessWeek magazine, one of his rivals.

Bercovici writes, “‘BusinessWeek has faced what a lot of us have faced, but they’ve faced it more severely,’ he said. ‘It’s a storm that has spared no one. Rather than buying up others, we’ve been focusing on how do we refit ourselves for this new era. Thankfully we went very heavily into the internet and put a lot of resources on it seven or eight years ago when everyone else putting theirs in deep freeze.’

“I also asked Forbes if he foresees his namesake magazine switching its website from an all-free model to one where readers would have to pay to access some or all content.

“‘I think what you’re going to see is a whole slew of people trying various things,’ he said. ‘There’s certain content, specialty content, where that might work. We do it with some of our letters. We’ll have to see how what they call microprocessing, where you’d pay half a penny for an article, how that might work.’ (I’m pretty sure he meant micropayments.)”

Read more here.

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