Jason Shubnell is the managing editor of Benzinga, a financial news website based in Michigan.
Before joining Benzinga in September 2013, Shubnell worked for a variety of publications, including WhatsUpDetroit.com, EndZoneNews.com and Grand Central Magazine. He is a graduate of Central Michigan University.
Benzinga was founded six years ago and currently has more than 3 million readers in more than 125 countries every month.
Instead of giving financial advice, Benzinga believes that it gives news to consumers in a way that it allows them make informed decisions to take control of their financial future.
Shubnell spoke by email with Talking Biz News. What follows is an edited version.
What attracted you to join Benzinga three years ago?
I really liked the vibe of the place when I interviewed at the office (plus, I needed some steady employment). Within a week or so, I got started as an editorial intern.
I was mostly doing freelance work for the first 1.5 years after graduating from Central Michigan. I cam across a Craigslist job posting for an internship with Benzinga.
You came from a sports background. Did that help or hurt?
I think a journalist’s natural instinct is to keep learning new things. It hurt in that I didn’t have much of a finance or financial news background. However, the Benzinga team really helped me to learn the basics and as time went on the industry became much easier to understand and cover.
What is the editorial strategy behind Benzinga?
Our vision is to make content as easy as possible for people to consume. We like to think of ourselves as the trading idea network. We empower traders and investors with actionable advice.
To be clear, we do not give out any stock recommendations.
Who are your core readers?
Active day traders are our core audience. Our main readership comes from the 25-44 year-old demographic.
Who do you see as your main competitors editorially?
Bloomberg, Reuters, WSJ, Motley Fool, etc. — we consider any player in the financial data and news world to be a competitor.
Benzinga Professional is a real-time news feed that competes with Bloomberg, Reuters and Dow Jones terminals, as well as Fly On The Wall and Briefing.
How do you decide what to cover each day?
We look at the biggest news items and think of different ways we can write about it and create trading ideas. This can range from M&A news, analyst ratings that come out early in the morning, as well as any unique items, rumors, etc. that we generate from the desk.
Our average story is about 250-300 words, though we range from 100 word snippets to 1,000 longer form pieces. We have about a dozen freelancers, staff writers and contributors and are always looking for talented writers.
We use Chartbeat and Google Analytics to help track what stories and topics are performing best.
Are there industries or companies that you’d like to increase coverage of?
We would love to cover everything as voraciously as we can. One area in particular that we’ve been ramping up on is the ever-growing fintech space. We are essentially a fintech company ourselves, so it only sees natural to put more attention onto that industry.
Benzinga started a daily email recently. What is the strategy behind that?
The strategy was to get a trader caught up on any major news they may have missed, inspired mainly by theSkimm. These range from major macro developments, earnings from that morning and the previous night, analyst ratings and trending stocks/topics.
The newsletter is sent to their inboxes every morning around 8am; a delayed post is released on Benzinga about 60-90 minutes later. You can sign up by clicking here or email minutes@benzinga.com
Your content appears on other websites as well. What does that do for the company?
We’re still a relatively young company. The more we can democratize the spread of information and give people access to information on sites they are already visiting, the more we’re holding true to our vision and we think the customer will make that connection as well.
