Blodget talks Business Insider as it turns 10

Henry Blodget

Shan Wang of Nieman Lab interviewed Business Insider founder and editor in chief Henry Blodget about the website as it celebrates its 10th anniversary.

Here is an excerpt:

Wang: Editorially, are there new topics Business Insider is trying to build more coverage around, in this particular political moment?
Blodget: There’s a ton we’re not currently covering. It’s a question of year-after-year, being able to grow our editorial budget.Over the next year or so, we want to continue deepening our financial coverage. That’s an area where subscriptions are particularly promising for us.
The new type of story that has been incredibly promising over the last couple of years is the growth of social video. When Facebook first opened up video, we and others assumed it’d be an extension of web video, which had been on site and on YouTube and elsewhere for many years. We’ve learned that no, this is a new type of story, with a different type of discovery, different user experiences, usually on mobile, usually in feed.
Once we started doing that, the scale of the audience was phenomenal, beyond anything we’ve considered was possible. So we’ve invested a lot of resources in that over the past couple of years. Our team is about 30 or 40 people just focused on telling stories that way. That’s become a huge business for us.

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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.