Categories: OLD Media Moves

Forbes on BusinessWeek, paying for online content

Jeff Bercovici of DailyFinance.com interviews Forbes CEO Steve Forbes about what’s going on at BusinessWeek magazine, one of his rivals.

Bercovici writes, “‘BusinessWeek has faced what a lot of us have faced, but they’ve faced it more severely,’ he said. ‘It’s a storm that has spared no one. Rather than buying up others, we’ve been focusing on how do we refit ourselves for this new era. Thankfully we went very heavily into the internet and put a lot of resources on it seven or eight years ago when everyone else putting theirs in deep freeze.’

“I also asked Forbes if he foresees his namesake magazine switching its website from an all-free model to one where readers would have to pay to access some or all content.

“‘I think what you’re going to see is a whole slew of people trying various things,’ he said. ‘There’s certain content, specialty content, where that might work. We do it with some of our letters. We’ll have to see how what they call microprocessing, where you’d pay half a penny for an article, how that might work.’ (I’m pretty sure he meant micropayments.)”

View Comments

scott says:
September 25, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Do I taste sour grapes? Steve is still smarting after the BW talent raid that recruited Martin Keohan and Charles DuBow.
Falcon Forbes says:
October 24, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Malcolm Steve Forbes has no clue how irrelevant and dry his own publication has become. If he were to stop trying to be a pundit and look over the shoulder of his dear brother Timmy Forbes spend an hour or three looking over the work of the 25-year old children putting out the copy on his Web site, and the overpaid layabouts loafing about his building at 60 Fifth Ave., he'd shut the whole thing down, take the cash and retire to his private island.