Categories: OLD Media Moves

Topics pages to be focus of new BusinessWeek web site

Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times writes for Monday’s paper about a new Web site feature that BusinessWeek hopes will attract more readers.

Perez-Pena writes, “The site, called Business Exchange, is one approach to the fast-evolving digital world, where some news sites that experiment have rapidly expanded their audiences while those that do little more than post articles online have been left in the dust. After two years of quiet development, it will go public in late September, accessible through BusinessWeekâ€™s own Web site (www.businessweek.com).

“The core of Business Exchange is hundreds of topic pages, on subjects as broad as the housing market and as narrow as the Boeing 787. Plans call for the number of topic pages to grow quickly into the thousands. (The first one created, which may or may not be in the public version of Business Exchange, was ‘BlackBerry vs iPhone.’)

“A few other magazines and newspapers have also become serious about building verticals, but they tend to jealously guard control of their online audiences and content. Not this one.

“Each Business Exchange topic page links to articles and blog posts from myriad other sources, including BusinessWeekâ€™s competitors, with the contents updated automatically by a Web crawler. Nearly all traditional news organizations offer only their own material, spurning the role of aggregator as an invitation to readers to leave their sites.”