Last week’s Radio 4 In Business programme looked at business newspapers and how some of the world’s best known-brands are struggling to compete with online rivals and in the face of the economic downturn.
Well worth a listen at this link, it includes interview with representatives from the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Bloomberg and Bloomberg Business Week.
A take on the Polis paper from the States. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman says that the Polis’ ‘What is Financial Journalism For?’ report addresses ‘one of those big, “dumb” questions’ that he ‘finds so valuable.’
“Those kinds of questions don’t get asked much on this side of the pond. That’s too bad. Even the subject of business media’s performance in advance of the current crisis seems to be something of a taboo.
“The scant attention the subject has received has been either the once-over-lightly treatment, a la Howard Kurtz, and or an ‘all-clear’ for the business press from our cousins over at the American Journalism Review.”
No, it’s not a typo – CNET has moved up the alphabet to introduce BNET, a new website featuring original and syndicated news, analysis and blogs on industry sectors including health care, energy and financial services.
BNET Australia and BNET UK have also been rolled out, Reuters reports.
“You look at a lot of the content that’s available, it still predominantly lives in trade journal articles. And then there’s a lot of content that’s sort of housed behind subscription firewalls. And so, consequently, it’s very fragmented,” Greg Mason, CNET’s senior vice president of the business media group, says in the Reuters report.
“There are good online newsletters that cover specific industries, but they’re sort of hit-or-miss.”
Will the new site be friend or foe to B2B publishers?