Buy a magazine or a Manhattan loft?
These days, one can purchase a delightful loft dwelling in the Soho district of downtown Manhattan for between $2 and $5 million. Or one can use the money to buy a magazine, which is what Bloomberg did this week when it acquired BusinessWeek. The publication, expected to lose up to $40 million this year, will be renamed "Bloomberg BusinessWeek", and not "This Bloomin' Week", as some wags have suggested.
'Twas the advertising downturn and the drift of readers of business news to the web wot done in BusinessWeek, just like that deadly duo killed Portfoilo in April, as Bruce Nussbaum good-humouredly noted back then... in BusinessWeek. The question now is will Bloomberg use its new purchase to launch a real attack on The Economist, which ate most of BW's lunch, or will it cannibalize it completely? Or will it it fit it up for the era of digital magazine readers that John Squires of Time says is almost upon us?
One thing's that's sure to change, though, is the Jack and Suzy Welch show. Curtain's coming down on that one soon.
