Dylan Byers of Adweek profiles Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel, who was hired two years ago to remake the business weekly that had been acquired from McGraw-Hill.
Byers writes, “When Bloomberg offered Tyrangiel the position, the 80-year-old, recession-worn Businessweek was a slim remnant of the robust weekly it had once been. Tyrangiel himself says he stopped reading it years ago. While negotiating the terms of the position, Bloomberg L.P.’s chief content officer, Norm Pearlstine, using a slightly different word, told Tyrangiel that the one ambition Bloomberg had for the magazine was that it be ‘great.’
“‘No one is ever going to say that to someone of my age again,’ Tyrangiel, who was then deputy managing editor at Time and heir-apparent to top editor Rick Stengel, remembers thinking. ‘No one is going to say, ‘First thing first: Make it great, and we’ll figure out the strategy from there.’’
“Tyrangiel told this story while sitting in a glass-encased conference room at the Businessweek midtown New York office building, infamous for its group work spaces (read: lack of privacy). It’s a striking building, which The New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger described as ‘one of the most exhilarating workspaces I’ve ever seen, with both the high energy of a trading floor…and the buzz of the newsrooms of old.’
“Tyrangiel, however, refers to it as something out of The Jetsons, betraying the fact that he still feels a bit out of place.
“‘I fully concede I woke up on third base in some cases,’ he says of the money and other types of support at his disposal. ‘This magazine has advantages that other magazines did not, and I’m grateful for them every day.'”
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