Shafer: Bloomberg Business won’t change my reading habits

Politico media columnist Jack Shafer writes about Bloomberg Business, the website launched Wednesday.

Shafer writes, “Having spent time on Bloomberg Business today, I can’t imagine that its virtuosity will ever change my reading habits to the point that I visit the home page to taste the day’s zeitgeist.

“The failure isn’t just Bloomberg’s but of most every major news organization. Here we are two decades into the commercial Web era and still no designer has formulated a design grammar that can beat the universal newspaper grammar for the efficient browsing and digesting of news. Given a choice between the new Bloomberg Business and the print editions of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, I’d go for the ink and paper every day. If fact, I page through four newspapers before arriving at work for precisely that reason.

“Now, don’t get me wrong. I probably read as much news on the Web as almost anybody, especially when chasing breaking news or pursuing my personal and arcane news interests. But the only unifying quality to Bloomberg Business worth mentioning is the name Bloomberg, and that isn’t enough to lure me back. The site reminds me of a modern version of the mid-1990s Pathfinder portal, built by Time Warner to aggregate all of its magazine journalism. The site failed miserably because, like this iteration of Bloomberg Business, it was too wide and too deep of a river to swim.