Q&A: Entrepreneurs want inspiration from Entrepreneur

Ray Hennessey is the editorial director for Entrepreneur Media, overseeing all editorial for the digital team of the monthly business magazine in New York.

Before that, he was director of business news of Fox Business.

Before joining Fox in 2007, Hennessey was the editor of SmartMoney.com, where he was responsible for all the financial editorial content, television operations and technology. He also had a weekly appearance on CBS News, providing financial commentary.

Prior to that stint, Hennessey was the news editor for Dow Jones & Co. and CNBC-Wall Street Journal Television from 1998 through early 2006. There, he managed the personal-finance and fund-industry coverage at Dow Jones Newswires and appeared on CNBC’s “Dow Jones Halftime Report,” as well as serving as a regular guest host of “Wake Up Call.” Additionally, Hennessey wrote the IPO Outlook column for The Wall Street Journal.

He began his career as a journalist for The Times in Trenton before becoming the managing editor of A.M. Best Co., where he oversaw BestWire and BestWeek, publications that covered the insurance industry.

Hennessey spoke by email with Talking Biz News about his job. What follows is an edited transcript.

What attracted you to working with Entrepreneur?

Two things: the brand and the culture. Entrepreneur, in my opinion, has the best brand in media. How many other places are so clear about the audience they have? There’s something magical about entrepreneurship, particularly American business creation, so the brand is so strong and recognizable. I never have to explain our audience or what we cover.

Second, it is a family-owned company. The Shea family has owned the title for decades, and while it is a much bigger company that it was in, say, the 1980s, it still has that family-run feel to it. It is entrepreneurial, rather than corporate — and most of my career has been with very large media companies. This is a big, growing, diverse company, but it has an intimate feel as well.

How is Entrepreneur’s content different online than what is in the print magazine every month?

Unlike some other places, particularly in our competitive set, we try to make sure our storytelling really matches the medium in which it is delivered. We have an “audience first” mentality here. Our audience wants to consume our brand, irrespective of the medium, so that gives us huge opportunities to deliver great storytelling in different ways. For instance, we have some wonderful think pieces and long profiles in print. It’s what has made the magazine great over the years, and even better since Amy Cosper took it over a few years ago. Online, there is a range of content, from nuts-and-bolt how-to pieces, to opinion, to tools. And our video production really helps visualize stories in way you can’t do in print and online.

Also, there’s just basic volume. We established a contributor network about a year ago, and our daily output of stories online has gone from under 10 to more than 50 each day. So, on any given day, you’re going to find a lot more of what you’re looking for.

Do you try to play off the content in the print publication?

Yes, but I think media is beyond the let’s-extend-the-print-piece-online mentality. Certainly, with signature lists and big projects, the magazine and online works closely together. In fact, over the past year and a half, I’d say that relationship has gotten closer. There is constant communication among all the various pieces of our organization, and that includes video and our book-publishing unit. There’s more of a content ecosystem now, but it isn’t in the old model. It’s more organic, and it puts the audience, rather than the medium, first.

Whom is Entrepreneur’s target audience?

I love this question. We are the title for anyone who innovates, the dreamers and the do-ers. At one level, we are the home for the “traditional” entrepreneur, the small-business owner who might own a dry cleaner or a fast food franchise. That also includes the tech startup, or the owner of a company that just hired its 50th employee after its second funding round.

But I also want a bigger audience than just that. Right now, if you work for a large corporation, you are being judged by how “entrepreneurial” you are. Buzzwords like “pivot” and “disruption,” once just associated with the startup crowd, are now used by the largest of American companies. So our audience encompasses those people, who want to be entrepreneurial in their approach managing parts of companies.

Lastly, there are the aspirational entrepreneurs, the people who are considering starting a business or making a job change. They have dreams, but haven’t actually put them to work yet. We actually have good traffic on stories about careers, an area we hadn’t focused on previously but dovetail nicely with those businesspeople looking for a change.

All of these people drive our economy. All are engaged in innovating and delivering products and services that better their customers’ lives. I know that sounds like ad copy, but it isn’t. It’s simply who our audience is.

Are your competitors Inc. and Fast Company? If not, who are they?

They are our competitors, and I suppose you could add larger titles like Forbes, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to that mix. Increasingly, LinkedIn is a competitor (and a partner) online, since we have similar audiences.

I’m not ashamed of focusing on competition, either. One of the great things about working for Roger Ailes at Fox was that you were always aware of the competition. You studied the competition, figuring out what they did well and then did it better. You also saw what they did wrong, and avoided that. We always listen to their footsteps behind us, and make sure we try to give their editors a bad day at work every day. I personally believe competition is healthy, and ignoring that has helped doom a lot of media titles over the years. Saying you don’t have competition, or even pretending to ignore it, is just hubris and doesn’t help you win. We are winning and want to stay that way.

What has been your focus for Entrepreneur.com since taking over more than a year ago?

Serving the audience better. With apologies to my colleagues in our craft, journalists often write about what they think is important, or what matters most to them, regardless of what the audience consumes. Analytics, particularly online, give you a great sense of what the audience wants and what it needs. I challenged the staff to put the audience first, and it has yielded much better storytelling and more diversity in ideas and opinions.

I’m also trying to change what we write about. We’ve added a net of about five or six positions since I got here, and it is a great newsroom. That has allowed us to focus on content areas like franchising, and areas of behavior and psychology. Two great young reporters, Kate Taylor and Laura Entis, have really embraced those beats, and we’ve seen a fantastic audience reaction.

I’m a free-market guy, so we’ve added a lot more economics coverage, and gotten a bit more opinionated. The idea was to spark a conversation with the audience, and we’ve seen these point-of-view pieces generate a lot of social activity and commenting.

Are there areas that you’d still like to improve coverage?

Well, I’m never completely satisfied with anything, so I am always looking to improve everything. I think we need to sprinkle in some more in-depth, deep-dive pieces online, though, to be honest, the audience hasn’t really embraced that yet.

From a content perspective, I want to see more science and technology coverage. That’s the bread and butter of the startup world, and you can never have enough. Our audience loves stories about new and emerging technology. Jason Fell, the managing editor online, started a column called Far Out Tech, and it always does well. Of course, we could quadruple that kind of coverage and never run out of neat things to write about.

I also think we need more profiles of entrepreneurs. Our audience loves to hear about success stories and loves to steal ideas from people. Again, this is an area where we could write way more of these and it wouldn’t be enough.

What content have you been most proud of in the past year?

It isn’t one piece of content, but the way we have changed the way we look about our role as content providers. Earlier this year, we made an investment in a company called AlleyNYC. It is a coworking space for developing companies. The CEO there, Jason Saltzman, is very tied into the global startup scene, so the partnership has allowed us to get closer to company creation than any other media property out there. We really get to see companies and ideas formed at the ground level, and that has really improved our perspective in how we cover startups in general.

The direct conversations we have with our audience is content. Just because it isn’t written in a magazine or captured in video doesn’t mean we, as a media company, aren’t providing content. That’s the great thing about the events we do. We get to talk directly to our audience and have that dialogue. What Jason and the AlleyNYC team give us the chance to speak more directly to the startup audience. To me, that’s a great leap forward in content delivery.

Also, we are making a bigger push into tools. Dave Pomije, our VP of digital out in California, spends a lot of time thinking of tools and products entrepreneurs need. We have a tremendous platform to deliver these.

What are entrepreneurs looking for in terms of editorial content? Is it mainly advice on how to run their business?

Inspiration. That’s probably the best word to use. Some are looking for ideas on businesses to start, while others are looking for advice on how to manage thorny personnel or business issues. When you think about an entrepreneur, they are very creative, driven, crazy people. Coming up with ideas is a big part of what they do, so anything that leads to inspiration is in demand.

We also found that they want to view daily news through the lens of the entrepreneurial experience. Lauren Covello, who worked with me at Fox, runs our news operations here and she tries to find angles in daily news stories that would resonate most with the audience. Look at Obamacare. You can read anywhere about the big political debate over the rollout, but we have focused on what is really happening at the ground level of companies implementing the law. Even in reading our daily news, the audience wants inspiration and ideas that they can put to work in their own lives.

How much content is your staff posting on a daily basis?

Last year, there were days when there would be just six pieces of original content online posted a day. Now, we crack 50. About third of that comes from staff stories or freelancers, while another third comes from our contributor network, and another third comes from content partners, like CNBC, Fortune, Fox Business and Business Insider. When you really pinpoint where all our online growth has come from, it’s been from this increase in content. There’s a still a lot more room to grow, but we have to do it wisely from here.

Incidentally, that doesn’t include video. Our video team has really ramped up production, and I imagine that we will see more content growth there, as well.

A lot of business people write your content. How do you keep them from pumping their companies?

Actually, that hasn’t been as much of a problem as you might think. Stephen Bronner, who manages our contributor network, polices that pretty well, but he doesn’t need a heavy hand. It’s about the audience. We are careful about whom we allow to be contributors, unlike some of our competitors. You can’t just sign up and post. That’s crazy and dangerous. Editorial standards are important to me, and those apply to everyone who writes for us, whether you pull down a paycheck here or simply contribute content. That’s why we have three full-time editors who do nothing but work with our contributor network. When their pieces run, they have been edited, vetted and meet our standards. Not every place can say that nowadays.

As for outright promotions, I think our contributors know they can’t do that before they ever put pen to paper. The audience can smell it when they are being sold to, and they reject it. So, if you’re smart, then you are a contributor who presents yourself and your ideas. The audience loves that, and might then get to know your company or its products later.