BusinessWeek Launches Major Art, Editorial Redesign
Lucia Moses
OCTOBER 02, 2007 -
While lifestyle coverage has become a staple of business titles like Forbes and Portfolio, BusinessWeek is taking a strictly-business approach with new design and editorial changes that appear Oct. 12.
With its first redesign in four years, the magazine drops its lifestyle column, Executive Life, while upping the emphasis on news and global coverage. In a dramatic change to the cover, art director Andrew Horton, working with Boston-based ad agency Modernista!, replaced the serif logo with a smaller, sans-serif logo and jettisoned the blue bar that separated the logo from the cover image.
“The notion was, it’s clean, simple, it’s bold but elegant, and kind of straightforward,” explained Stephen Adler, editor in chief. Detailing the changes in an interview today, Adler said he began looking at overhauling the book right after taking the job in December 2004. “The reader is much busier, they’re much more engaged with the global economy than they were before, and they’re consuming business information way differently from the way they used to.”
Inside, a new organization and design seeks to reflect those changes, Adler said. A briefs section is expanded to four-and-a-half from one-and-a-half pages, while a four-page section of lighter news is reduced to two. A numbers-heavy page of financial charts is replaced with a one that’s more colorful, easier on the eyes and contextual.
Throughout, the magazine features a cleaner, bolder look with department slugs and oversized page numbers that are designed to aid navigation. To elevate the profile of BusinessWeek’s long-form stories, Adler recently appointed Robert Hunter as assistant managing editor for features; with the redesign, features will open with dramatic spreads.
Once-segregated international business news is integrated throughout the magazine’s coverage. Some sections were renamed or moved to clarify their purpose or make the magazine easier to navigate. Personal Finance becomes Personal Business, News & Insights pares down to News, and opinion columnists, once in various locations, now occupies the back of the book. (Adler is upping the visibility of Maria Bartiromo’s biweekly Face Time column, however, moving it to a weekly frequency and putting it in the front of the book.)
Recognizing that readers are getting their news from multiple outlets, BusinessWeek is also adopting the increasingly popular aggregation approach of citing other news sources in the briefs section and feature well.
The changes to the print magazine come as the magazine’s own newsgathering and reporting processes evolve to adapt to a multimedia landscape. Adler has been integrating the print and online editorial staffs over the past three years and said he expects the staffs to be fully combined sometime in 2008. He said the title would continue to have two executive editors, the titles currently held by Ellen Joan Pollack and John Byrne, who oversees the Web site.
Whether the design overhaul will be enough to move the needle at the McGraw-Hill Cos.’ title remains a question. The weekly has been hit hard this year as core advertisers in such categories as technology, financial, B2B and auto have migrated online. This year through Oct. 1, ad pages declined 16.5 percent to 1,585, per Mediaweek Monitor. Circ has been relatively stable, declining only 1.2 percent in the first half of ’07 to 919,343, per the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Keith Fox, president of the BusinessWeek Group, is bullish on print, however, citing signs that the ad-spending pendulum is swinging back in favor of print. Nonetheless, come January the magazine will have a fully integrated print and online marketing and sales force in place to meet demand from marketers who want to buy across platforms.
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