Biz magazines look to Internet as the future

Business magazines such as Forbes and Fortune, still suffering from a loss in advertising pages, are increasingly plotting how to use the Internet to improve revenue and attract more readers, wrote Samantha Melamed of Media Life Magazine.

Melamed wrote, “All this is changing how business news is reported and published. Users typically visit the business sites several times a day, often beginning even before breakfast, and that means sites have to be updated in real time. That in turn has forced the print editions to reassess how they cover news, and the move has been toward more analysis and features.

“That’s very much the case with Forbes, the print title, and its web site, Forbes.com.

“‘Forbes.com is far more of the moment, and we are far more analytical,’ [Forbes president and publisher Jim] Berrien explains, speaking of the print edition. The Forbes site, which drew 6.471 million visitors in June, ranking it at No. 7, now includes financial video reports, wire news tickers and even a personalized section called Forbes.com Attache, which users can program to include local weather, sports statistics and stock reports.

“On the print side, Forbes has launched 12 international editions in the past two years, and Berrien says its Forbes Life has gone from quarterly to bimonthly while tripling ad revenue in the last year and a half.

“But print and the web must work together. ‘The web is an incremental choice for marketers that didn’t exist five years ago, so we all have to be mindful that there are other places where they can spend their money,’ Berrien says. ‘A magazine without a robust web presence is at a disadvantage.’

“Yet at the same time the actual editorial operations of the business magazines and their web sites are being stitched together, working more and more as one, reflecting a trend at newspapers as well.”

Read more here. This is one of the more prescient pieces about how technology is affecting business journalism that I have read in quite a while.