Roya Wolverson, the global business editor at Time magazine, has just taken a new job as deputy global news editor at Quartz, a business news website. Never heard of it? That’s likely to change. Quartz and other digital upstarts are attracting top talent – and readers. No company or CEO can afford to ignore them.
There are many CEOs focused – nay, obsessed – with getting covered in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. An article in the Journal would validate the company’s strategy, rocket the stock to new highs and mark the CEO as a Serious Corporate Player. It would be publicity nirvana (assuming the article was positive), with reprints and back-slapping in great abundance.
Well, that world is long gone (although CEOs obsessed with publicity remain). The Journal still commands influence but it is a force now shared with dozens of outlets, from newswires, television and, in more recent years, news websites.
News websites aren’t exactly new of course. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been on the web for years, while still rolling out daily editions on newsprint. But now news organizations that exist only online are covering business, economics, policy and world events – the core of “serious” journalism that the Times, the Journal and others once had all to themselves.
A little more than a year ago, Reuters and Bloomberg were scooping up reporters and editors by the fistful, from the Times and other media groups that were cutting staff. Roya Wolverson’s departure from Time, where reporters are bolting as fast as they can send out resumes, is an updated version of this narrative. This time it’s Quartz – an upstart web-only publisher – that is doing the hiring.
And it’s not the only one. Yahoo! has expanded into business news, and recently hired Mike Santoli, the widely respected Barron’s columnist. Business Insider continues to grow. And BuzzFeed, the monster that seems to be marching toward world domination, is adding business news to its eclectic soup of celebrity gossip, politics and funny cat photos – all of it meant to keep people viewing and sharing its content.
It’s no accident that these forays into business news are happening after the presidential election. Visitors flocked to online sites to keep up with the latest news in a close-fought race. Keeping them by offering hot news from the business world is an extension of that strategy. And if overpaid celebrities with gargantuan egos and a habit of behaving badly are fodder for news headlines, lately the corporate world has been supplying them in abundance.
But even humble, hard-working CEOs (and their equally hard working if underpaid PR managers) should keep a close eye on Quartz, Business Insider and Yahoo Finance. They’re serious about covering the issues and breaking important stories. My bet is they will be doing more exclusive features – a coveted prize – both with and without the cooperation of CEOs.
Just look at Yahoo. In early February the Yahoo news politics team had an exclusive interview with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, just as the debate on immigration reform was heating up. Exclusive interviews with CEOs by the Yahoo Finance news team can’t be far behind.