How to remake BusinessWeek
Monday we learned that BusinessWeek, where I've worked for 22 years, is on the block. It may be sold, or stay in McGraw-Hill (where it's been for 80 years). But the business is losing money (I don't know how much). Whoever ends up with it is going to have to figure out quickly how to turn a business news operation built primarily as a weekly magazine into a profitable franchise for the age of near ubiquitous and real-time information.
I was thinking about about this obsessively this week as I closed three magazine stories, two that I wrote and one that I edited. For three days, I was immersed in the what I call "the last 5%." It involves a large team of professionals engaged in tweaking, polishing, compressing and dressing articles--hopefully giving them the gleam, smarts and clarity of a top-rate product.
This last 5% consumes a sizeable effort and expense. The question the next (or current) owner of BusinessWeek is going to have to grapple with is whether such attention to detail is worth it, or, alternatively, whether there's another way to achieve the same goal.
Yesterday afternoon I was sitting with a good friend and editor. We were studying a one-page story I had edited on India, and we were focusing on the wording of one problematic sentence. I told him that this level of detail was driving me crazy. He said he loved it. What's more, he argued that it was precisely this work that gave BusinessWeek its value--that without it we would sink into commodity journalism (and probably disappear).
