Categories: OLD Media Moves

Business news site launches in Brooklyn

A website covering business news in Brooklyn has launched and is being run by a former Time and Fortune editor.

The Bridge is focused on covering the companies, entrepreneurs and trends that have made Brooklyn a growing economic area. It covers Brooklyn’s growing pains as well, including rising costs and inequities.

The Bridge is run by Steve Koepp, a longtime Brooklyn resident who previously was business editor at Time and executive editor of Fortune.

“I couldn’t help but notice that Brooklyn was changing fast,” said Koepp in a telephone interview on Monday. “They’re building things all around me. And some of these companies are growing into big enterprises, like Vice Media and Kickstarter. This is a place that has become a real economic force.”

A lot of media cover Brooklyn, but Koepp wants to dig deeper on individual business stories: How they got started, what obstacles they had to overcome, how they survive long-term. Koepp believes he has the focus, the experience and the borderline obsession to make this work.

Koepp, who has funded the site from his savings, is currently the only full-time employee. He is using freelancers for his stories and his photographs.

The site hopes to sell direct ads once it garners a large enough audience. Koepp also expects to generate revenue from special reports and from events. He is not currently considering subscriptions.

After launching last week, Koepp has been adding a feature a day. He is also aggregating Brooklyn business news from other sources on the site, and he hoped to add a weekly newsletter and an opinion section.

“It’s very much a hatchling at this point, and a work in progress,” he said. “But it got off to a good start. It’s like the captian on a submarine who has to know how everything works.”

While at Time, Koepp led the reporting on the downfall of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and produced a cover story on the proposed RJR-Nabisco leveraged buyout. At Fortune, he managed its website in 2008-09 and edited cover stories on Carl Icahn and Indra Nooyi.

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.

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