Some good changes at BusinessWeek

Former BusinessWeek reporter Gary Weiss notes some good things happening at BusinessWeek under Bloomberg ownership, including the publication of a 3,000-word plus article.

Weiss writes, “First there is a long takeout by Daniel Golden describing how for-profit colleges are targeting the military. Dan is a Bloomberg reporter, and he is modestly described as just that in his six-word biography.

“Come now, Bloomberg, don’t be shy! Dan Golden is a Pulitzer Prize winning former Wall Street Journal reporter who was a senior editor at the late Condé Nast Portfolio . His article is rich, detailed and above all, looooong, certainly by recent BW standards. I copied it to Microsoft Word and noticed that it weighed in as just under 3500 words. That’s just under standard Portfolio feature article length.

“Now, it didn’t have quite as much analysis as I usually like to see in such things, but I don’t want to quibble because it’s refreshing to see long form journalism, especially in the decimated pages of BusinessWeek. Bravo!

“The second thing nobody pointed out to me is just a little stylistic thing, but significant: in the new issue there is none of the loony page numbers that had been introduced under an atrocious new design, in which page 10, say, would be ‘010,’ computer-style. This pretentiousness has been eliminated. Good thing.”

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