Categories: OLD Media Moves

BusinessWeek magazine now organized like a Web site

Louise Story of The New York Times critiques the redesigned BusinessWeek magazine on Friday and concludes that the print publication is now structured much like a Web site.

Story wrote, “‘If you think about it,’ said Martin S. Walker, chairman of Walker Communications, a magazine consulting firm in New York, ‘no one goes to the Web to see the latest Oscar de la Renta beautiful gown. You want to see it on a beautiful full-color magazine page. What works on the Web is news and information, and that is basically what business magazines are.’

“From an advertiserâ€™s perspective, the new BusinessWeek is designed a bit more like a Web site. There are more opportunities for companies to buy ads near articles related to their industry, and the magazine is broken into chunks, with four separate tables of contents. Readers tend to linger on such tables, so the ad pages next to the start of each section could prove to be lucrative. There are also more ads at the front of the book.

“Borrowing another theme from the Web, the magazine has added a feature within articles called links, which summarize related articles from other publications. Several media outlets do the same thing within their pages, but it is more novel for a publication to do so right next to its own work.”

Read more here.

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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View Comments

Lauren Finnis says:
October 13, 2007 at 6:43 pm
I just received my first issue with the redesign, and I'm not sure that I like it. Although the website-like format may be more appealing for advertisers, I don't find it as attractive as a subscriber. The articles all appear so uniform and don't draw in my attention. If I wanted the quick, efficient web format, I'd go to WSJ online or even BusinessWeek.com.