David Carr of The New York Times writes about how the field of business journalism has collapsed.
“Apart from the challenges of covering business in a digital age, the endemic categories of advertising including financial services, insurance and consulting services, and vaporized ad budgets from Detroit, have left once-fat chronicles of the business epoch bereft.
“But it isn’t just that Cadillacs aren’t selling like they used to. It’s also that the people who made them, bought them and drove them seem far more mortal and less interesting than they did just a few years ago.
“Business magazines used to relish explaining all the complex new financial instruments that Wall Street was using to pile up profits. But now it has become clear that the titans who were wielding those obscure tools had no idea what they were doing — even less an idea than the journalists in some cases.”
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This is from Joe Weber, former chief of correspondents at BusinessWeek and now a professor at the University of Nebraska
Is David Carr right in his obit for business mags? His contention that biz glossies are adorational and aspirational... may be true of Forbes and Fortune, but that has long been less true of BW. Forget the fawning: a coterie of economists and reporters devoted to analyzing corporate missteps have long served BW readers' needs for a grasp of what's going on in the economy and in Corporate America. And, even if the occasional
lionizing of CEOs took place (usually just a vehicle for corporate
strategy analysis), how it is possible people will lose interest in
savvy analysis of company game plans and business? Isn't commerce what drives us? Carr's piece seems more like the carping of a cityside reporter who always saw business journalism as something back in the classifieds rather than a smart take by a serious student of the biz press. Will glossy biz journalism survive? If it doesn't, it will be because advertisers just found more cost-effective means to reach audiences, not because readers are disillusioned. Carr just has to check the still-solid readership figures for BW to see that. The readers haven't left the field, just the advertisers.