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Businessweek (Re)Blooms

When Bloomberg LLP purchased hoary old Business Week magazine from McGraw-Hill you could be forgiven for wondering what they were thinking. The multimillion dollar price tag may have been mere pocket change to the maker of ubiquitous and highly lucrative financial data machines. But still, why bother?

After all, Washington Post Co. is jettisoning Newsweek after nearly 50 years of ownership and a recent complete redesign, because it can’t make the property pay.

Now called Bloomberg Businessweek, both the print and electronic versions of the specialty publication have undergone less of a redesign than a re-imagining. And therein lies the promise of its success.

From it’s very name, it’s clear that the reborn media property is part of a new family and new strategy — the new owner  is the brand, and businessweek is its extension.

It’s a larger and more complicated media property now, packed with information packaged all sorts of ways, serving distinct groups from traders to cultural zeitgeistists. There are short, snappy pieces along with narrative features (Meg Whitman on the campaign trail, municipalities deep-sixed by sophisticated financial trades, etc.), investigative pieces (former Lehman CEO Dick Fuld’s perjury, for-profit college scams), and continuation of special areas of expertise (for instance, the importance of design to productivity).

There are lots of moving parts to manage, so Bloomberg’s strength in low-key, by-the-book management will come in handy. In contrast, other recent attempts to reinvent the business magazine such as Conde Nast’s Portfolio failed, in part because of editorial/managerial temperament.

Bloomberg’s challenge (as with whoever ends up owning Newsweek) is less to make print relevant in the electronic age than to revitalize a trusted (and therefore valuable) brand so that it nimbly adopts new technologies to reach varied audiences in varied ways.

Check it: http://www.businessweek.com/http://www.businessweek.com/

Making Content Pay

What do the following have in common — The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and ESPN?

They are among the news organizations (now called “content creators”) that are successfully charging folks to read their content online. That is, they have walled off their valuable content so that readers have to pay to enter.

Their success in this endeavor is studied with great interest by hundreds of other media outlets starved for funds and perplexed how — in this information-wants-to-be-free era — they will ever get back paying subscribers and the advertisers that go with them.

Will people pay for local news coverage? Mike Klingensmith publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune more than hopes so. He’s planning on it.

“It’s not an inexpensive process to create the proprietary content we create,” he explains, “and we have to be compensated for it in the future. As I believe almost all content providers will have to be.” [See the original interview by David Brauer in full: http://bit.ly/StarTribInterview]

He favors a web-based product that with all-inclusive, as opposed to a la carte, pricing – with free samples available via as many links as possible. Content that is completely free vs. partially free (a sample) might depend on the reader’s location or story source (such as AP or staff).

His team is not just redesigning the news organization’s website, but rebuilding it into a platform, to act as more of a “content tent” that embraces staff-generated news, vendor-generated services and user-generated content.

The content has to display on whatever type of device consumers use. “We’re going to follow our consumers in that regard,” says the man with deep experience in magazine journalism, which is generally more advanced in consumer marketing. “It’s not for us to dictate; it’s for them to tell us.”

The Power of Brevity

Here’s an interesting counterpoint to my recent posts on the peril of overly relying on PowerPoint to communicate clearly and thoroughly:

“[Business schools] should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations,” Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki tells the New York Times’ Adam Bryant (3/19/10). “If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off.”

No one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Ditto for 40 info-impacted PowerPoint slides. The more you explain, the more points you try to impart, the more overwritten your language, the more you’re likely to be ignored or, ironically, misunderstood. Little to nothing stands out — except, perhaps, little bits here and there that can be taken out of context and used against you later. (You know how some workplaces can be…)

Lesson: If you can’t say it in a few lines, have a face-to-face and follow up on that conversation with a memo of understanding. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Deadly Bullets

The U.S. military finds bullets a very useful means of sending a message.

We’re not talking field ops, but the type of bullets that riddle projection screens and communiqués.

The little buggers are awfully useful for highlighting and summarizing. Problem is, they can also greatly oversimplify messy, complex situations beset by interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. Like combat conditions, bureaucratic tangles, or the average American workplace.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” says Iraqi commander Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster in The New York Times. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

That doesn’t quiet the staccato bursts of pseudo info, of course.  In fact, a whole cadre of officers spend so much time making presentations they are nicknamed PowerPoint Rangers. You can’t blame policy-makers and strategists for trying to bring sanity, hierarchy, and order to a messy world.

But, according to the Times, commanders say that the slides don’t impart as much useful information as a five-page paper and generally lack polished, analytic, persuasive prose – and, worse, can stifle discussion, critical thinking, and thoughtful decision-making. “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” sums up Marine Gen. James N. Mattis.

And such stupidity can be costly. According to the book “Fiasco” Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, wouldn’t issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted. Instead, he just passed on to Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led 2003 Iraq invasion, a series of vague slides that he had already shown to then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Still, it’s not going anywhere. It’s too imbedded in the culture. Gen. David Petraeus, who today oversees the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and says some PowerPoint briefings are “just agony,” uses the program himself because he appreciates its ability to display of maps and statistical trends.

Communication tools can facilitate communication, not substitute for it. Overcomplexify or oversimplify — there are perils everywhere. If you try to visually capture the complicated interrelationships and levels in a messy situation, you get a perplexing mishmash (as I noted in an earlier post). Or you could simplify and risk eliminating the nuance that’s necessary for true understanding and wise decision making. You’re stuck between Iraq and a hard place.