How Business Insider differs from WSJ and the FT

Isabell Hülsen of Der Spiegel interviewed Business Insider co-founder and editor in chief Henry Blodget about its operation.

Here is an excerpt:

SPIEGEL: The small tech blog you founded after your time on Wall Street has become a news site with 94 million unique visitors a month. What is your journalistic ambition?

Blodget: Our mission is to figure out the journalistic model for the digital medium, finding out how we get the right stories readers want, at the right time and wherever they want to read them.

SPIEGEL: Sounds good, but that is more a question of technology and distribution. What kind of journalism does Business Insider stand for?

Blodget: One thing where we definitely want to differ from other business media is that we believe that, in the past 30 years in the United States, our economic system has been harmed by complete shareholder domination. An idea has been created that the only purpose of a company is to make money for shareholders.

SPIEGEL: You mean papers like the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal focus too much on shareholder value? That is an astonishing statement for somebody who has been part of the system.

Blodget: The defining value for at least a couple of business publications is that profit is the only thing that matters in the end. That’s just not the best view for a healthy capitalistic system. At Business Insider we want to celebrate companies that not only create value for their shareholders, but for their clients, employees and for the world — companies like Google or Amazon.

Read more here.