EIC Stone on the Businessweek brand

Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab interviewed Bloomberg Businessweek editor in chief Brad Stone about the magazine’s brand.

Here is an excerpt:

SARAH SCIRE: I have a big-picture question to ask right away. In this age of digital daily news — including on Bloomberg.com — and print magazines shrinking or folding and Substacks and all the rest, what is a magazine brand right now?

BRAD STONE: I still think there’s a real need for a distraction-free, lean-back news product. If anything, the increase of noise and the flood of information coming at us on all of our digital tools, at work, at home, during the day, at night, over the weekend … to be able to unplug and spend time with the print product … I think there’s still value in it. Now, that said, Businessweek is, in a lot of ways, a daily product. We’re a daily newsletter. We publish stories every single day across all Bloomberg digital properties. We aim for three long-form stories a week. And the print magazine, now monthly, is kind of the crystallization of our identity.

Obviously it’s got to be a little different — the stories have to be a little more evergreen. We can’t be as newsy as when we were a weekly magazine. But the mission is the same — which is to explore, chronicle, [and] examine leaders and companies and technology and business and economics and politics. And to help people who work in business, or students of business, to learn about this complicated world. I do think having a print magazine and being able to spend some time with it outside the noise has a lot of value.

Read more here.