William J. Holstein

The New Business Week
APRIL 25--Bloomberg has now carried out a thorough redesign of Business Week magazine, where I worked for 11 years onstaff and then later as an online contributor. So I have fondness and respect for the franchise that Business Week has traditionallyl enjoyoed.

The new magazine has a very different feel. The first half of the magazine feels like a Bloomberg monitor. Very tight, crammed, too many elements on each page, for way too many pages.

When it does finally open up into an appealing magazine style, the story choice seems off. Karl Taro Greenfield writing about Meg Whitman for six pages? This is not Business Week journalism. This is a Fortune or Time style, turning to a celebrity writer (although I can't fathom why he's considered a celebrity for any reason other than his parentage) to write about a candidate for governorship of California. The Apple story is smack in the middle of the BW franchise, but a French city that mismanaged its finances? An Israeli entrepreneur? Not even close.

So although BW is now part of an organization with 1,700 journalists around the world, the Bloomberg crowd still doesn't understand the heart of what a Business Week magazine is. At its best, it has to lead the business world's debate with articles like the Hollow Corporation, Stateless Corporation, Casino Society. I wrote or edited some of those stories, certainly not all. We looked forward. We framed the debate. Just throwing more content at the reader, as this redesign does, is not the trick. The magic is in defining a personality for the magazine and a mission, and then hammering away at that every week. It seems to be that Bloomberg is still in search of those subtle qualities, and I'm not sure it will ever be able to find the answer.