Bloomberg launching weekend product, cutting BusinessWeek to monthly

David Merritt, head of Bloomberg Media Editorial, and Katie Boyce, senior executive editor for Bloomberg Digital, sent out the following on Thursday about digital content plans for 2024 and Businessweek.

As we all know, digital media is changing rapidly. Social algorithm shifts and advancements in AI are transforming how digital audiences consume news. As we head into 2024, our strategy needs to be even more focused on serving bloomberg.com subscribers directly and getting them to engage with our platforms daily.

We’ve already started critical work to support this strategy: we are redesigning our homepage to better package and showcase all our journalism including audio and video and we’ll focus more next year on the app as the best place for subscribers to go every day. We’re exploring how to leverage everything we publish from newsletters to podcasts to grow subscriptions, which passed the milestone of 500K earlier this month.

But as we march towards one million, we also need to build on our digital content strategy to better embrace a subscriber-first approach with three important areas of focus:

A new weekend product

Our digital subscribers know Bloomberg.com provides invaluable insight during the work week, but too many are tuning us out on the weekend when we still have a lot to offer them. We see the weekend as a prime opportunity to build stronger connections with our audience to form a daily habit with our brand.

We will launch a new digital weekend product in early 2024 to showcase our premium video, audio and long-form journalism as well as expand on our culture coverage for business consumers – including travel, food, luxury, sports, entertainment and more. We’ll also elevate more of our journalists’ voices – from Opinion columnists to newsroom experts – to help our subscribers catch up on the week that has passed and set them up for the week ahead.

We’ll be building out a new, global digital weekend team, which will commission and package coverage for a redesigned weekend platform. This group will work in lockstep with Alan Goldstein’s weekend news team, who will continue to run our breaking news operations for the Terminal and digital.

Bloomberg Businessweek

Bloomberg Businessweek is already a strong asset to digital, ranking first among all sections on the site for unique visitors and helping convert many readers into subscribers. Through Apple News+ we now reach millions of new people every week, with revenue from that partnership helping offset print declines. And we’ve further expanded the brand across platforms this year – from “The Businessweek Show” on Originals to our new weekly talk podcast “Elon, Inc.”

But now it’s time to think about the next chapter for the printed edition. The market for a weekly news magazine has been challenging for some time. But we see demand in both digital and print for the ambitious long-form journalism Businessweek is now well known for. We will relaunch the print magazine as a premium monthly product and kick off a full redesign, led by Kristin Powers’ design team, including the use of heavier paper stock for a more high-end look and feel, later in 2024. On digital, we’ll still publish Businessweek stories every week, complete with the innovative and immersive treatments that we know drive engagement for our subscribers. And we’ll do even more across video, audio, and events.

Quicktake Explainers

Finally, explainers are a critical tool for our users — they help subscribers better understand the world as news breaks and answer questions with expertise they can’t get elsewhere. But as consumption changes and AI disrupts these functions, we need to reimagine our approach.

Quicktake has meant a variety of different things here at Bloomberg – from all of our social video to a print magazine. In 2024, we will reset Quicktake as our explainer brand, anchored in new formats for bloomberg.com and the Terminal and expanding into video, audio and events. We will sunset the Quicktake magazine to focus on this digital expansion and we’ll look for ways to incorporate the content into the new Businessweek magazine.

New Roles

On Businessweek, Joel Weber has been the driving force behind the brand’s success over the last six years, winning prestigious awards, taking on ambitious projects and embracing more multimedia. As we embark on this new chapter, Joel has decided he’s ready to move into a new role in the Bloomberg newsroom. He’ll continue as editor through the transition while we search for his replacement.

In order to accomplish the other ambitious plans we’ve outlined next year, we are hiring for two new Executive Editor roles on Digital — one to lead the Digital Weekend team and another to oversee the Quicktake Explainers team.

All three of these digital leadership roles will be posted internally today and we encourage those in the newsroom who are interested to apply. And stay tuned for additional digital weekend roles, which will also be posted shortly.

There will be more to share on all this in 2024, which is set to be an exciting year for us all.

Dave & Katie