Slate pulls plug on The Big Money

Jim Romenesko has a memo from Slate Group editor in chief Jacob Weisberg and publisher John Alderman announcing that its immediately shuttering its business news site The Big Money.

The memo states, “This has been a difficult decision, in part because so many aspects of the project have worked as we hoped. Jim Ledbetter and his team have done a first-rate job on the magazine itself, cultivating a talented crew of young writers, coming up with terrific features like Recessionary Road and The Facebook 50, and responding with speed and style to business news. In his short time as Publisher, Brendan Monaghan has broken new ground for the Slate Group as a whole, most importantly by masterminding our recent Untethered Conference.

“The problem, in a nutshell, is that the site is not pointed toward profitability on a fast enough timetable. We’ve struggled to grow the site’s traffic to carry enough ad inventory to run a profitable business. There are some specific reasons for this slow growth which relate primarily to the category rather than to the quality of the magazine. Our timing also could have been better. TBM launched the week of the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008, and its existence has coincided with a deep trough in advertising market for business-oriented publications.

“The decision to close TBM as a separate destination doesn’t signal a move away from business as a category or a subject. To the contrary, we expect Slate’s engagement with business to get much stronger as a result of folding in aspects of what the separate site has been doing.”

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