Friday, October 30, 2009
BusinessWeek’s Future Is Cloudy, but Better Than It Could Have Been: The Grim Non-Bloomberg Scenario
BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.
Never say never: Condé Nast, which is closing down its Portfolio business magazine, has decided not to turn off the lights at Portfolio.com. Instead, it is shifting control of the Web site–essentially, the Portfolio.com address and a couple years of archived content–over to American City Business Journals, its corporate cousin in the Advance Publications family.
I’m still on record predicting the demise of seattlepi.com–the online-only zombie version of the erstwhile Seattle Post-Intelligencer. My gut is that even though the Hearst-owned site has an edit staff 80 percent smaller than its predecessor paper, it still won’t be able to generate enough traffic and advertising to cover its costs. But while Hearst isn’t ready to declare victory, it does say that the first two months of seattlepi.com’s life have been “encouraging.” Via a press release, Hearst offers up a bevy of traffic stats that show the site has grown even as its staff has shrunk. Hearst doesn’t offer up any info about revenue, but does say that its “sales and marketing team is highly energized.” Good start.
The Boston Globe can keep printing. The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, has reached an agreement with the Boston Newspaper Guild, the paper’s lone holdout union. A new deal involves pay cuts and “modifications to the lifetime job guarantee provisions,” but will allow the paper to stay afloat, for now.
