New Bloomberg Businessweek editor: We want to be a pleasure

Matthew Kassel of the New York Observer interviewed new Bloomberg Businessweek editor Ellen Pollock about the magazine and her career.

Here is an excerpt:

Under Josh Tyrangiel’s six-year stewardship, Businessweek became more of a general interest magazine with splashy covers and ambitious features that could compete with The New York Times Magazine and New York. As deputy editor, you had a lot do with its redesign in 2009 after the Bloomberg LP purchase. Do you intend to keep the magazine the way it was, or will it lean more toward business news now that Mr. Tyrangiel is gone?

We’ve never deviated from being a business magazine. Every week we run a pretty heavy dose of economic, tech, finance and general business stories. We aim to serve business readers, whether they make ball bearings, diapers, software, movies, campaign ads or credit default swaps. The magazine has to be accessible and helpful to all kinds of very smart readers, no matter what their business expertise. And we want it to be a pleasure to read—visually and intellectually. Our editors and writers get a kick out of delivering our readers the unexpected. We are competing for their time, and we want it to be worth their while.

Read more here.