Zeke Turner of Women’s Wear Daily writes Wednesday about the changes that have been made at Bloomberg Businessweek under its “boy wonder” editor Josh Tyrangiel.
Turner writes, “Several members of Tyrangiel’s staff at Bloomberg describe him as a man who never raises his voice; never berates anybody, even when it’s deserved, and never makes people feel anxious on deadline.
“‘He was just extremely excited to be in charge,’ said New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren, who Tyrangiel hired as an executive editor when he was relaunching the magazine. ‘It was hard to imagine he ever had a job where he wasn’t in charge. He was just very comfortable in it.…He’s a full-on good dude.’
“Tyrangiel hasn’t just been charged with taking old BusinessWeek, winnowing down the old staff and relaunching it under a new name. His real charge is to create a 21st-century business magazine. ‘I want all readers. I want every reader. I want every single person who has an interest in global economics, business and commerce to be in these pages,’ he said.
“‘This is something that the business side always hates when I say it, but I am the reader,’ he added. ‘That is my actual job, to be the proxy for the reader.…What I’m trying to figure out is, how can we interest them? It’s this real balance between being comprehensive, making sure we prepare them for everything that’s coming in the week ahead and taking them out of their comfort zone.’
“Eric Pooley, a former managing editor at Fortune, came on as Tyrangiel’s deputy to offer the masthead bona-fide business magazine experience. ‘This magazine didn’t exist a year ago. We invented it last spring,’ he said. Pooley left magazines for a few years to work on a book and said he wouldn’t have come back to a business publication unless there was a job he was really excited about. ‘In a magazine world that increasingly seems to be managing for decline, Bloomberg was investing in growth,’ he said.”
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