Imitating the Web, for the Busy Reader
AN arm smashes through a magician's hat on the cover of the latest issue of BusinessWeek, highlighting an article about Bear Stearns's inability to conjure a rabbit to fix its hedge funds. The image may be eye-catching, but some readers …
Context & Ripple Effects
BusinessWeek's redesign lands one day after The Wall Street Journal's own look at business magazines' ad slump, the Web, and a new rival — a sector selling space to automakers, financial-services firms, and technology companies while chasing upscale executives whose attention is migrating online. The move is also a response to a longer-running critique of the category: bloggers were calling out shallow journalism at Forbes as far back as 2005, so shortening and reformatting carries real risk of confirming that complaint.
The timing is pointed: the issue's cover story is about Bear Stearns failing to fix its troubled hedge funds, exactly the kind of executive-relevant news the redesign is built to deliver faster. That the Journal covered the same story shows how widely the question of print's web imitation is being debated across outlets.
First-order effects
- BusinessWeek's readers get a print product rebuilt around web-style presentation — shorter items, more visual packaging — aimed at busy executives who currently skim rather than read.
- Advertisers already cutting spend in the category must judge whether the redesigned BusinessWeek delivers the upscale-executive audience at a rate worth paying for.
Second-order effects
- Rivals like Forbes and Fortune face pressure to match the scannable format or differentiate by doubling down on depth — the opposite pole of the same strategic fork.
- If imitating the web becomes the category norm, business magazines start competing on curation and brevity, eroding the differentiation that justified premium print rates.
Third-order effects
- Print and web presentation converge: when the magazine copies the browser's rhythm, the remaining case for print rests on portability and prestige rather than format itself.
- A sustained shift would push business publishing toward a model where the same editorial operation feeds both mediums, with the web version setting the pace and print as the digest.
The trend: Print business media are importing web conventions into their pages as reader attention shifts online, testing whether imitation can hold an audience that the medium itself is losing.