The strategy behind Daily Finance

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Amey Stone is the managing editor of Daily Finance, a new business site launched earlier this year by AOL that remains in beta format.

Stone is also an assistant managing editor at AOL Money & Finance where she oversees business news and investing coverage. She has been with AOL since 2005 and is the founding editor of BloggingStocks, WalletPop and, most recently, DailyFinance.

Prior to joining AOL, Stone spent eight years as a senior writer at BusinessWeek Online covering finance, investing and the economy. She has also worked as a financial writer at Business Week magazine, SmartMoney.com, and Financial Planning. She is the author of “King of Capital,” a biography of Sandy Weill, and a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in New York with her husband and three children.

Stone talked about the Daily Finance launch and its plans with Talking Biz News via e-mail. What follows is an edited transcript. (Disclosure: Stone and I worked together at BusinessWeek.)

Why did AOL decide to start this site when it has a number of other business-related sites?

The mission of DailyFinance is actually quite different and in many ways much more ambitious than our other sites. It offers all original content while our main site, money.aol.com, has traditionally aggregated content from partners. DailyFinance also differs from our blogs in that we are hiring full-time financial and business journalists and well-known columnists. While we offer plenty of opinion and analysis, the tone and style of writing is less blog and more online magazine. DailyFinance will also showcase best-in-class financial data and applications.

What is this site doing that another site like BloggingStocks.com isn’t?

DailyFinance is currently in beta and operating as a blog. But when we relaunch later this summer and unveil our new design, you’ll see a comprehensive business news and financial information site. BloggingStocks is the sister site to DailyFinance and is also very newsy, but focuses on providing stock ideas and market analysis from a team of great writers who are also serious investors.

Where did the writers come from?

A core group of editors and writers –- the ones with the most editorial and financial expertise –- came over to DailyFinance from BloggingStocks. That includes columnists like Peter Cohan, an author and venture capital investor, and Dan Solin, who wrote “The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read,” as well as editors, such as Michael Rainey. We’ve also hired financial journalists from award-winning publications which recently shut down, including Jeff Bercovici and Todd Pruzan from Portfolio and Matthew Scott and Tim Catts from Financial Week. Our tech columnist, Anthony Massucci, came from Bloomberg and Nikhil Hutheesing, who starts next week, came from Forbes.com. I was at BusinessWeek Online for many years.

How big will the editorial staff be? Will it continue to grow?

We currently have a small full-time staff and a larger group of freelancers and columnists, both of which we expect to grow in the coming months.

What’s been the results after three months in terms of visits and page views?

The traffic so far has definitely exceeded my hopes. Comscore shows that we had an average of about 2 million unique visitors in March and April. Our DailyFinance iPhone application has been a major hit. We’ve also gotten quite a lot of pick-up. Cohan’s incisive analysis of the financial bailout and sometimes scathing critiques of executives and regulators has been widely circulated around the web. The media coverage from Jeff Bercovici and Jonathan Berr has gotten lots of pick-up –- including from TalkingBizNews. Of course, we also benefit from promotion of our stories on AOL. Massucci, our tech columnist, wrote a piece on Oprah’s first Twitter that was promoted on AOL’s main page and got more than a half million page views.

Will this site break news, or will it be more analysis?

Our goal is to do it all –- break news as well as offer original analysis, features, investigations and commentary — and combine it with the best in online data, calculators and investing tools. We have big plans for DailyFinance!

What sites do you see as your biggest competitors?

We intend to take a seat among the best in business and financial news. We’d like our site to be as respected a source of information as the best business newspaper and magazine sites, but we also want to offer the timeliness of top online financial destinations and the personality of top market blogs. What we will offer that these editorial sites do not is best-in-class financial tools and applications for individual investors.

You’re getting content from other sites, such as WalletPop and 24/7 Wall Street. How were those picked?

So far, we’ve added feeds of news stories to DailyFinance that are in our family of sites at AOL Money & Finance. WalletPop is our personal finance destination, and 24/7 Wall St. is a close partner.

The format right now is blog, but will that change once the beta version is updated?

Yes. The new design will take some cues from PoliticsDaily.com, which is an AOL site that recently launched. DailyFinance’s new design will allow us to differentiate between quick, breaking news takes and longer, more thoughtful analysis pieces. Most important, it will give us more opportunity to showcase the great journalism our writers are already producing. The design also showcases the tremendous depth of data and research tools available for investors on the site.

How are the In Focus stories picked each day?

Our editors use the In Focus box as a way to promote some of our best stories.

Your background is with BusinessWeek online and the other AOL business sites. What did you learn from those that you’re applying now?

I’m throwing everything I’ve learned in 20 years working in journalism at this new site so let me see if I can boil it down. The main thing I’ve learned about online journalism today is that it has to be timely and offer a point of view. As for editorial management, I’ve learned that if you hire a bunch of really smart people, let them know how talented you think they are and don’t get in their way, everybody will have fun and produce amazing work.