Business Insider recommended non-existent books to staff

Business Insider, which last week laid off 21% of its staff and announced a push into using more artificial intelligence, suggested a book list to its staff that included fake titles, reports Maxwell Tani of Semafor.

Tani reports, “In an email to staff last May, a senior editor at Business Insider sent around a list of what she called ‘Beacon Books,’ a list of memoirs and other acclaimed business nonfiction books, with the idea of ensuring staff understood some of the fundamental figures and writing powering good business journalism.

“Many of the recommendations were well-known recent business, media, and tech nonfiction titles such as Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, DisneyWar by James Stewart, and Super Pumped by Mike Isaac.

“But a few were unfamiliar to staff. Simply Target: A CEO’s Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand by former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was nowhere to be found. Neither was Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia, which was supposedly published by the company Charles River Editors in 2019. Semafor could not find any evidence that either book exists.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.