ACBJ exec: No current plans to replicate planned Seattle tech site

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Kent Bernhard, the vice president of editorial at American City Business Journals, said Thursday that there are no plans to replicate across the company what its Seattle weekly business paper is doing by creating a Web site that covers technology.

The Puget Sound Business Journal, which is one of the 41 business weeklies owned by Charlotte-based ACBJ, hired two tech reporters from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer earlier this weeek. Those reporters will help the paper launch the tech site, along with its current staff.

“Everything we do is local and entrepreneurial,” said Bernhard. “We’ll see how it works. This is something that developed purely in Seattle. They figured out a way to do it.”

Bernhard said that “it hasn’t even come up” that other papers owned by ACBJ could start Web sites devoted to industries that are important in their specific markets.

However, the parent company has been quietly playing with a site that covers environment-related business practices. That site is at http://green.bizjournals.com/.  On its information page, it says, “Greenbizjournal.com provides context and commentary on green-related news, and aggregates the best of what is being published daily across ACBJ web sites and the internet.” The Kent Bernhard Jr. who writes for this site is Bernhard’s son.

Says Bernhard: “The Green site is completely different. As you’ll see from the ‘about’ page, it’s purely national in scope.”