Former WSJ ME Steiger likes Bloomberg/BusinessWeek deal

PRWeek’s Jaimy Lee interviewed former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, who now heads ProPublica, about the future of journalism, his thoughts on business reporting, and the relationship between PR folk and reporters.

Here is an excerpt:

PRWeek: How do you see business journalism faring through the next year?

Steiger: Business journalism is more crucial than ever, as we found with the great threats to the financial system and to the economy. Business news organizations have faced the same economic pressure that others have. Some of them have had to shrink staff and news holes.

At the same time, there are still a lot of good business journalists. I was encouraged to see that Bloomberg is acquiring BusinessWeek because I don’t expect Bloomberg to try to shrink it. This marriage offers an opportunity to enhance the visibility of Bloomberg’s own journalism and to make a much more robust BusinessWeek.

PRWeek: What about investigative journalism?

Steiger: Investigative journalism, with foreign correspondents, [is] one of the two areas that has suffered disproportionately in the downsizing of news organizations. It’s among the most expensive kinds of journalism to do. We hope that ProPublica can play a role in not only keeping the techniques alive, but actually improving on them and finding new ways to dig out information and communicate it.

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