Nieman Foundation at Harvard
As part of a larger “rethink,” Bloomberg Media’s signature print product, Bloomberg Businessweek, is now publishing every month.
The magazine’s new editor, Brad Stone, spent decades reporting on the tech industry for Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Newsweek before taking the reins at Businessweek earlier this year. Despite the industry headwinds that reduced the printing schedule, Stone believes the healthier-looking monthly edition remains the best place to read the magazine’s signature long-form work. The redesigned first issue, with a cover story by Stone, is on newsstands now.
The print relaunch comes alongside an important digital mandate, Stone told me. Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait has asked the newsroom to make converting readers into digital subscribers its “North Star.” (Earlier this year, when Bloomberg Media had 500,000 consumer subscribers, Micklethwait said he believed it was a “number which I think we can multiply aggressively.”) A full-priced Bloomberg subscription costs $299/year and includes digital access to Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg TV, and other subscriber-only content. Adding a Businessweek print subscription will set you back another $30.
Six years after introducing digital subscriptions, Bloomberg Media recently surpassed 590,000 subscribers. Monthly subscriber conversions are up a whopping 28% in the first quarter of 2024 as compared to last year, a spokesperson said. And Businessweek has an important role to play — it boasts one of the highest subscriber conversion rates across the sprawling Bloomberg Media operation.
The Businessweek website is currently headlined by stories on how Rivian became the anti-Tesla and a potential rival to the Olympic Games where the athletes are allowed to take steroids. But alongside investigations and profiles of “the most important people and companies in business,” the magazine also publishes fresh culture and lifestyle content. The “Going Viral” vertical, for example, explains “the story behind the hit” (most recently: why the spicy romantasy genre is taking off) while the “Pursuits” section currently ranks “the best lawn games for competitive kids, teens, and tipsy adults.” The print edition has been redesign to include “shorter, forward-looking reporting and explainers,” a new logic puzzle, and more data graphics.
Stone lives in California (he has three teenage daughters he doesn’t want to uproot with a cross-country move) but when we spoke near the end of June, he was working from the Bloomberg offices in New York City.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Now, that said, Businessweek is, in a lot of ways, a daily product. We’re a daily newsletter. We publish stories every single day across all Bloomberg digital properties. We aim for three long-form stories a week. And the print magazine, now monthly, is kind of the crystallization of our identity. Obviously it’s got to be a little different — the stories have to be a little more evergreen. We can’t be as newsy as when we were a weekly magazine. But the mission is the same — which is to explore, chronicle, [and] examine leaders and companies and technology and business and economics and politics. And to help people who work in business, or students of business, to learn about this complicated world. I do think having a print magazine and being able to spend some time with it outside the noise has a lot of value.Brad Stone: I still think there’s a real need for a distraction-free, lean-back news product. If anything, the increase of noise and the flood of information coming at us on all of our digital tools, at work, at home, during the day, at night, over the weekend … to be able to unplug and spend time with the print product … I think there’s still value in it.
But I have to ask: did Bloomberg Businessmonth ever get put on a whiteboard? I mean, how close did we come to seeing a name change?Scire: I think one of the things I’m hearing you say is that the audience has come to expect certain things from Businessweek aside from how often it’s published.
So yes, it was considered. And, yes, we’re really waving the flag now. We’ve kept the name, and it means a lot to people. What it stands for is this rigorous examination of the people and the companies and the issues that matter in business.Stone: We did have to consider the name. I’ve joked about Businessweek(ish); I don’t think that one was really considered. Some of this happened before they appointed me. In the end — and this was a decision I totally agree with — it’s a 95-year-old, world-renowned brand that really hasn’t been weekly for quite some time, because the digital product has been daily [and] at the beginning of the year, it became a biweekly. The name stands for more than the cadence.
Scire: The cover story [co-bylined by Stone and reporter Angelina Rascouet] is an interview and the brand is leaning more into live events. I also saw the new “a walk with” interview series. Maybe this is connected to what you were saying about having to be a bit more evergreen, but is it right to say there’s a renewed emphasis on interviews as a format?
But in terms of our front of the magazine storytelling, we have to think about it differently. So, yeah, turning to profiles, an interview series that we’re calling “five questions,” the “walk with” series. We’re taking advantage of the kinds of live events that Bloomberg Live is doing all the time and the kinds of executives who are coming into our offices, and even timing to things that are happening in the real world, like the RNC or the DNC. We’re asking: how can we take advantage of those moments? And I would say in terms of a “walk with,” if it’s President Biden, we probably are not doing a “walk with,” right? That’s a deeper story. For “a walk with,” we want to identify interesting figures in the world of business and politics and finance and sports and stories that may be a little underappreciated that we can bring Businessweek’s flair and style to. We spend some time with them, literally, take a walk with, [and] get outside our conference room or an office and learn about them. In the inaugural issue, we have an Olympian who’s built a social media empire.Stone: As we transition to a monthly we had to think about changing the kind of stories that we do, right? Because this is not a magazine that we can finish on a Wednesday and have it be in subscribers’ hands on Friday. There’s a little bit more of a distribution time for monthly magazines so we really went through a broad rethinking of the kinds of stories that we could tell — particularly in the front of the book. The feature storytelling that we’re doing in Businessweek has not changed all that much; I would say that the Arnault cover is a great example of how high we are now setting the bar in terms of the people and the companies that matter now.
It sounds like some of this research happened before you took the position, but what consumption habits are we talking about here? And, just personally, did any of the reader research surprise you?Scire: In the press release, there’s language like “the new strategy behind the brand is driven by the audience and subscribers consumption habits” and that the magazine has been “reimagined” based on those habits.
So, look, I’m under no illusion. Our readers are, in large part, encountering and interacting and responding to our stories online. None of that was a surprise. The effort in reimagining the monthly magazine was to give that still-robust Businessweek circulation something different and satisfying that can stand apart and might be beautiful and something that they want to have on their coffee table and sit with for weeks or a month.Stone: We’re so fortunate because Bloomberg has this vast digital audience. We’re pushing 600,000 subscribers right now. There’s also a significant and separate audience on the Bloomberg terminal and our Businessweek stories get pushed from Apple News+ where we will often see tens or even hundreds of thousands of extra readers.
Could you talk to me a little about that? Because the redesign does include a new mix of short and long pieces, as well as more graphics. How do you think through what justifies a longer read?Scire: There’s this thing I think about. In 2020, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief [John Micklethwait] was saying to folks in a staff note that too many stories are “mediocre or too long or both.” At the same time, he said “everybody will always read something long if it is fascinating. Some of our most-read stories are from Businessweek. But it has to be good enterprise.”
So — we’re careful about the stories that we tell. When we go long, they have to justify their length. But we do see in our numbers and on Apple News+ and in the conversion rate — which we study pretty carefully — when readers are becoming Bloomberg.com subscribers, when it works. And when it works, it works. We also survey our readers, and they tell us that long-form features are one of the most valuable things about Businessweek. I think the LVMH [cover story] becomes our canonical example. This is a fascinating figure, and if you get to the end of the story, you find that Bernard Arnault has taken a personal stake in one of his biggest rivals, that he’s appointed his youngest kid to an executive role in one of the holding companies, and that, even though he’s 75, he has no plans to retire. Stories that can deliver throughout the length of the story and deliver a satisfying third-act twist? We think that justifies the length.Stone: Totally. It’s something that we have to think about every single day because, look, we’re under no illusions about the attention spans of readers. And, Sarah, again, I’ve got three teenage daughters and I know how younger readers engage with shorter stories. At the same time, I have a rule of thumb that if we want to go long, we have to be able to justify it. It’s got to be a powerful narrative with well-drawn characters and surprises and a sense of satisfaction for readers when they reach the end of the story.
Scire: You mentioned subscriber conversion — something the Nieman Lab readers love to nerd out about. It’s up 28% over year over year. Why is that? And are there particular stories that have converted subscribers you want to shout out?
Stone: It’s up 28% in the first four months of this year. Bloomberg is [one of the] top-converting sections inside Bloomberg and we’re proud of that. We’ve got a North Star inside the Bloomberg newsroom of growing conversion. But, look, it’s not the be-all and end-all. There’s a lot of stories that we feel passionate about that, editorially, are important to us, and may not be high-converting.
Scire: Are there any commonalities between some of the ones that do seem to convert readers?
So, Businessweek isn’t Markets — we’re not that transactional — but if we can help people and make them smarter in their careers and their lives, and give them something interesting to talk about or interesting to bring into work, then they’re going to pay for it. Ultimately, Businessweek has to be useful to people, and if we’re useful to them, then they’ll pay for it.Stone: Yeah, it’s a good question. Look, another really high-converting section within Bloomberg News is Markets, right? And why is that? It’s because they are delivering information about companies and stocks and market movements that our readers value, that is useful to them. I think that’s the really simple but interesting underlying equation. If you’re useful to readers, if you’re giving them something that makes them smarter or helps them in their lives or careers, they’re going to pay for it.
Scire: The redesign is described as “pared down.” Maybe this is just what I’ve caught online so there’s a bias there but when I think about Businessweek, I remember pretty eye-catching covers and sometimes quite edgy designs. Does a monthly magazine require a different approach?
That’s not to say there’s any retreat in terms of the creativity that we bring to it, but I just wanted it to feel different and paring it back somewhat is about reducing the distance between the magazine and the articles and our readers. I want to make sure that nothing distracted from the articles and our subjects and our analysis. We’ve got the most talented group of designers, probably, in the world of magazines and we’re going to do eye-catching and striking things. But to start out, for a monthly, I wanted it to feel different [and] like a visual departure.Stone: When I took over the job, I made a conscious decision that I wanted the monthly magazine to look and feel different — that it needed to be an editorial and visual departure from what we’ve done before. Prior incarnations of Businessweek were well-known and justifiably celebrated for the design flamboyance. I was part of that; I joined Bloomberg in 2010 and the first five years, I was a writer for Businessweek. We had a lot of fun.
Scire: About the Businessweek daily newsletter — do you see that as a free, top-of-funnel news product to reach people who are not yet subscribers? Or is it primarily serving people who already have paid access?
Stone: Well, it’s outside the paywall so you don’t need the Bloomberg subscription. I described it yesterday as a window into our daily work. I wanted to really put a Businessweek sort of voice on display in the newsletter, so every every edition of Business Week daily is led by one of our regular contributing writers with a short essay on something that’s very topical. I want it to be the most interesting newsletter that Bloomberg has and we do have the versatility to be tech one day, politics the next, business and economics after that. It’s a growing newsletter in our stable. [Note: “The newsletter’s audience has grown by 7% so far in 2024 and by more than 26% since making the switch from a weekly newsletter to a daily newsletter in December 2022,” according to a Bloomberg press release.] Hopefully, it’s going to be another great front door for Businessweek and for Bloomberg.
Scire: O.K. I was poking around and it seems meaty enough that you don’t necessarily have to click through on every link to get the flavor of the story.
Stone: I want it to be a satisfying sample of what we do, but never the whole meal. At one point, we were just publishing a whole feature story. Now, maybe it’s a great excerpt and it leaves you wanting more.
Scire: You come to this job with so much reporting experience. I would be interested in how you feel tech and business reporting has changed in the past ten years or so. Are there things that worked then that don’t work now? What have you seen?
There’s a little bit more of an adversarial relationship between the press and tech companies and tech leaders — not always, but certainly sometimes — and that’s because they are maybe less idolized, if that’s the right word. They’re seen as powerful forces in our society that deserve really close and somewhat skeptical scrutiny. That’s because of the ways in which they’ve wielded their power and consolidated control over the economy. So, yeah, it does feel quite different today versus when I started.Stone: Well, I can go back 20 years, because I started covering Silicon Valley in the 90s. Early on, it felt like more of a hero story where the pioneers of technology in Silicon Valley were changing the world, and they were figures of widespread admiration. They were certainly more open to the press back then and it was also maybe a little less covered. I was in San Francisco, first for Newsweek and then The New York Times, and it was all felt like I was a correspondent in a foreign bureau, and now, 20 years later, this is one of the most covered stories in the world.
Scire: You’ve brought up Apple News a couple times. There’s an interesting back-and-forth with media companies thinking through their relationships with platforms and tech companies; some publishers feel they’ve been burned by over-investing in various Facebook strategies, for example. Could you talk about how you see that partnership?
Apple News is this tremendous boon to Businessweek and we don’t just get traffic from Apple News, but we get paid by Apple News. I think we have to be transactional and selfish about it. We’re there to take those readers and make them our readers and subscribers. It’s a wonderful relationship; I do think Apple is building a tremendous product with Apple News+ and I’m a huge fan of it. But history teaches us that it’s probably never a good idea to have intermediaries between you and your readers, right?Stone: Totally, yeah. It’s something that I definitely think about. The history of news and tech teaches you to be cautious, right? A lot of newsrooms across the media built around the traffic they were getting from social media companies, and they got really burned with some really high-profile flame outs.
Scire: I love games so I have to ask about the business-themed logic games that are new to the magazine.
So with Joel Weber, who was the former editor of Businessweek and is working in a different part of the newsroom, we sat down and conceived this game. There’s a tremendous puzzle master — his name is Andrew Chaikin, and goes by the wonderful name “Kid Beyond” — and we asked him to develop a game with us. You saw the first version of it [in the inaugural issue] but we’re looking forward to really experimenting and trying new things in forthcoming issues.Stone: One of the things that I was thinking as I was reconsidering the monthly magazine was, let’s not have more words on the last page. Let’s do something fun for the reader that we’re imagining is spending a lot of time [reading the magazine]. One of the wonders of a print magazine is finishing it. You get that small feeling of triumph.
Scire: Excellent. What did I forget to ask you about?
In the launch issue, the profile of Jeff Yass is the work of Bloomberg News’ wonderful Wall Street reporter Annie Massa. There are million other examples. We have this enormous resource that powers the magazine and provides an unending stream of great ideas from the journalists we work with.Stone: I’ll just say that Businessweek is unusual. One of the great advantages we have is that we sit on top of — or alongside of — the Bloomberg newsroom of 2,900 journalists. We actually only have a few dedicated writers, and I consider myself to be one of them, but by and large we’re drawing stories and creativity and energy from the Bloomberg newsroom.
