Can Business Insider’s Blodget earn the trust of readers?

Ken Auletta of The New Yorker profiles Business Insider editor in chief Henry Blodget as he tried to grow the website and distance himself from his Wall Street analyst career.

Auletta writes, “The loudest noise often comes from Henry Blodget, the editor-in-chief, who occupies the first seat in the sixth row from the entrance. He sits with his back to a white concrete pillar, facing his reporters and editors, wearing a white shirt, a tie, and a charcoal business suit. When he talks, his arms swing and his voice rises, conveying the enthusiasm of an evangelist.

“Blodget bounds from his chair to pace, and to extoll the Internet. Online, space is limitless! Business Insider could post a slide show of seventy-five — a hundred — photographs, he declares: ‘A newspaper couldn’t print seventy-five pictures!’ A television news story might cost a few million dollars to produce; with a handheld camera, one of his reporters could make a decent video for several thousand. Blodget’s voice rises: ‘What the Internet has done is made a million sources of information available. It’s only a click away.’ And: ‘The Internet has disrupted many industries. The newspaper business has been destroyed. It’s beginning to happen, arguably, to television. Consumer behavior is changing!’

“Business Insider was started in 2007, by Kevin P. Ryan, an Internet entrepreneur, and Blodget, who became the C.E.O. and the editor-in-chief. Blodget, who is forty-seven, gets up every morning at five-thirty, writes four or five blog posts a day on average, and dashes off twenty to thirty tweets. Most weekday mornings, he conducts an online video-interview program, Daily Ticker, for Yahoo, and is himself frequently interviewed on television. Once, he raced from his Brooklyn home at 4 A.M. to catch a flight to Chicago for an advertising-pitch meeting, only to discover, upon arrival, that he had packed two left shoes.”

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