Bloomberg Businessweek celebrates 90th anniversary

Bloomberg Businessweek is celebrating its 90th anniversary, and staffers Peter Coy, James Ellis, Paula Dwyer and Joel Weber write about its past.

Coy, Ellis, Dwyer and Weber write, “The first issue of this magazine appeared on Sept. 7, 1929. Its black, red, and gold art deco cover was free of news. It featured a big triangle pointing down at an inscrutable photo—an overhead, nighttime view of an intersection in an unidentified big city.

“The editors obviously had no way to know that seven weeks later the stock market would crash, ushering in the Great Depression. They did observe that “the market is now almost wholly ‘psychological’—irregular, unsteady, and properly apprehensive of the inevitable readjustment that draws near.” But in the metaphorical style of the day, they also said, ‘There is no financial frost in the air as yet, and we look for a long stretch of Indian summer in industry before winter sets in.’ The first issue carried squibs on tariffs, railroads, farms, Palestine, and even this tech breakthrough: ‘Dry Ice Finds Many New Uses.’

“How we’ve survived, thrived, and evolved from 1929 to 2019 is a sprawling tale. We’ve been shaped by each of the thousands of journalists who’ve worked here over the past nine decades.”

Read more here.