Media mavens have been predicting it for some time, but when the
once-powerful Business Week magazine went on the block
last week — reportedly for one dollar — it came as a shock,
perhaps most of all to the BW journalists who have been covering
the shift away from print.
“It couldn’t happen here,” one New York staffer told me. “But it
has.”
Proprietor McGraw-Hill hid behind corporate jargon in merely
announcing it was examining “strategic options” for the troubled
weekly. In fact the corporation is desperate to dump the
magazine. Business Week, which once made $100 million a
year, now reportedly loses that amount.
McGraw-Hill chairman, president and CEO Harold McGraw III is
quoted in magnificent understatement as saying, “Cost containment
will be a priority for us all year.”
Business Week once carried more than 3,000 ad pages a
year, making it one of the fattest books in the country. In the
first half of this year, it sold only 590 ad pages, compared with
702 for Fortune and 911 for Forbes. All were
down more than 30 percent compared to the same period last year.
I had a ringside seat during the magazine’s heyday as a
BW news supplier through McGraw-Hill World News, the
in-house news service that I directed. I worked closely with
BW department heads to meet their exacting journalistic
standards — a far more demanding brief than anything I had seen
at the Associated Press, my previous home.
This was 1976-1981, a period when the magazine was a beacon of
national and international business trends. Business
Week was must-read material for executives who wanted their
news in perspective. Washington political figures also followed
the magazine, and many, including Henry Kissinger, were
accessible to its dynamic 30-person Washington bureau.
The late editor Lew Young was an international power himself,
attracting top business executives to his off-the-cuff speeches
and his road show presentations with key staffers. He was a
regular on NBC’s “Today Show,” interpreting economic trends in
his salty locutions.
Young invested heavily in foreign coverage, adding new bureaus
and personally prodding his reporters to go after exclusive
stories. Although no intellectual, he was on friendly personal
terms with such thoughtful leaders as Felix Rohatyn and Pete
Peterson.
I once organized a lunch for him in Paris, and had no trouble
attracting 25 French business heavyweights. Lew stunned them by
predicting, among other things, that AT&T would soon be
broken up, and it was. (He also predicted IBM would be broken up.
He was not quite infallible.)
It was a set of old-fashioned journalistic principles that kept
Young’s magazine fresh. Every story, he repeated to his editors,
had to be “relevant, timely and useful.” There was no room for
fluff. He wanted BW to lead the business news agenda
despite its weekly frequency. Any story in the works that showed
up in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times
before BW’s Wednesday night closing was ruthlessly
killed.
“Readers always remember if they have seen a story before. We
can’t be repeating something they already know,” I recall him
saying.
Although firmly in the corner of free trade and global business,
the magazine’s editors occasionally veered left. One cover story
in my era called for a national industrial policy, accompanied by
an editorial suggesting it was time for wage and price controls.
A Heritage Foundation essay once called BW the “anti-business
business magazine.” Young responded with a letter calling the
writer “either a fool or a knave”.
Those lapses in ideology were rare, however, and BW
under Young never stopped flourishing.
Many readers and ex-staffers date the beginning of the magazine’s
decline as far back as Young’s departure in 1984. His low-key
successor, Stephen Shepard, chose to broaden editorial content to
satisfy a corporate goal of a magic million circulation, up from
950,000. Shepard’s formula temporarily achieved the McGraw-Hill
target but at the expense of the magazine’s hard-earned gravitas.
As circulation numbers slipped back under 1 million in the 1990s,
Business Week revenue that had once propped up the
corporation was now locked into a steady downward course.
Shepard left in 2005 after an extended search turned up Steven J.
Adler, deputy managing editor of the Wall Street
Journal and a Harvard Law School graduate — a rare
credential in the news business — as his successor. Speculation
was that Adler had a chance to save the magazine and move
upstairs to the 49th floor executive suite.
The BW chalice proved poisoned, however, and Adler has
spent four years slashing staff and frantically trying to
reinvent the magazine and its website. Moving ever further away
from the BW of its glory days, he has chopped up
editorial content and brought on celebrity columnists, including
former GE chairman Jack Welch and his new wife Suzy Wetlaufer,
and Maria Bartiromo, a CNBC personality also known as “Money
Honey.”
Yet ad pages have declined steadily since Adler came aboard. He
is likely to be sold off with the magazine, assuming a buyer can
be found. Time Warner and Forbes have both said they are
not interested. In fact the industry is now waiting for
Fortune and Forbes to be treated to their own
“strategic options.”
