Tag Archives: Redesigns
Forbes magazine to undergo redesign
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Forbes‘ acquisition of True/Slant means that its flagship business magazine will undergo a redesign under new company chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin, according to a company release.
The redesign follows those unveiled earlier this year by competitors Fortune and Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Dvorkin, the founder of True/Slant, will be joining Forbes to lead all editorial areas at Forbes as chief product officer effective June 1.
Dvorkin started consulting with Forbes in April of this year. He had been executive editor of Forbes magazine from December 1996 to April 2000. In his new capacity, Dvorkin is charged with creating and implementing many new initiatives in the editorial product and the engagement of Forbes’s audiences. He will oversee a re-architecting the Forbes.com website; redesigning the magazine; and will assume responsibility for all editorial product across Forbes.
“To participate and lead Forbes into its next stage of media life is truly exciting,” said Dvorkin in a statement. “Forbes is a trusted brand with deep and specific meaning to those interested in information that inspires and enables them to succeed and to create wealth.”
He continued, “With all of Forbes’s great experts, the wealth of Forbes data, and its real-time web features, we have a unique ability to stimulate the social media conversation. Our journalists, producers, audiences, marketers and all variety of entrepreneurs will be engaged as they never have been before with one another. Forbes is stepping ahead of everyone on this one.”
Dvorkin brings 35 years experience in both old and new media platforms. Besides his years at Forbes, Dvorkin was page one editor of The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at Newsweek, and an editor at The New York Times. After leaving Forbes, Dvorkin was senior vice president, programming at AOL, where he was responsible for News, Sports and Network Programming and played a significant role in the launch of TMZ.com.
ComputerWorld launches redesign
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Information technology publication ComputerWorld unveiled a major redesign with the May 24 issue showcasing a clean, modern and functional design.
“For more than 40 years, readers have turned to Computerworld as a trusted and unbiased source for the technology industry,” said Scot Finnie, editor in chief, Computerworld, in a statement. “This redesign will showcase our superb content in a fresh, clean design, fitting to the evolving and emerging technologies that we cover.”
These changes accompany the recently announced Computerworld.com site enhancements — including updated navigation and appearance — improving the user and advertiser experience.
The new design elements include:
- New typefaces giving the magazine a modern look throughout;
- Clean, sophisticated magazine cover design;
- Article pages with more white space and dramatic photo;
- Makeover of the popular Shark Tank section — featuring anecdotes about clueless users and bosses.
Read more here.
FT.com launches new video platform
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The Financial Times announced Wednesday the launch of a new video technology platform and a dedicated video hub on FT.com.
Users will experience video on a broader range of mobile devices, including the iPad. The video content will be available on an exclusive area at www.ft.com/video, as well as being embedded in relevant news stories and analysis.
The redesigned section of the website is in line with the look and feel of the Financial Times brand, and includes a number of options to help users better navigate content on the site.
The new features include an “editor’s choice” selection of the top videos, a “most popular” section that lets users see at a glance what everyone else is watching, and users can also search by the most recently added videos.
Categories have been developed to align content with the main FT.com sections: Companies, Markets, Global Economy, Management, Personal Finance and World.
“FT.com video content is extremely popular for both users and advertisers,” said Steve Pinches, lead product manager, FT.com, in a statement. “The FT.com now publishes over 180 videos a month and has seen video views top 1 million a month. In response to this demand we are investing in an enhanced video platform which, as well as providing a much improved user experience, will also allow for much deeper integration of video right across FT.com and emerging platforms.”
BusinessWeek introduces redesigned magazine; Editor Tyrangiel talks change
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TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
The job facing Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor Josh Tyrangiel since he took over running the magazine in December was to make the weekly glossy more appealing to readers and advertisers.
On Thursday, the redesigned magazine was unveiled, marking Tyrangiel’s biggest move in accomplishing that task. One staff member told Talking Biz News: “I think the redesign looks really fresh and allows us to leverage the strengths of the magazine in a way that the previous iteration did not. I never liked ‘The BusinessWeek’ wrap-up as it started the magazine with old news.”
Another staff member said to Talking Biz News: “The new magazine is more inviting. There’s more emphasis on evocative writing as well as catchy presentation. Making BusinessWeek into a compendium of dry Bloomberg copy would have been a giant error; Tyrangiel leaned in the opposite direction.”
In the past five months, the magazine’s editorial staff has been gutted with layoffs and buyouts, with its content now relying more heavily on stories produced from Bloomberg News, whose parent bought the magazine in December.
Tyrangiel, former deputy managing editor at Time, has been slowly rebuilding the staff, hiring new creative and photo directors and top editors. On Thursday morning, Tyrangiel talked to Talking Biz News about the redesigned magazine and other plans for BusinessWeek. What follows is an edited transcript.
1. What are you trying to accomplish with this redesign?
I was giving a very simple mission, and that was to make a great product. The goal all along has been to create an indispensable business magazine. I feel like the redesign accomplishes that in several ways. It is genuinely comprehensive.
If you are interested in business and read the magazine, you will be prepared. The other thing is that it is seductive. If you want to be exposed, there’s just enough that when you turn the page, you’ll be surprised.
2. What are some of the major changes to the magazine?
It’s truly about organization, and some of that has to do with the sheer number of stories and staff members that we have access to. There are twice as many words and 20 percent more editorial pages in this issue than the last issue. We wanted to structure it well and make sure there’s clarity. We wanted to make sure you could find it what you want.
3. How will this magazine be more appealing to readers and advertisers?
Our readers are the more important part. It’s more appealing because you get more for your money. We are covering the entire world of business. We are doing it in a style that is very ready friendly. We have a prose style, but it is about getting to the point. Every story has a bottom line, which is actual takeaway. Our readers told us they wanted more clarity and depth, and I think we achieved that.
4. You mentioned that the magazine needs to be comprehensive. How does it accomplish that?
It took us a long time to come up with a taxonomy of business. Those five subjects — global economics, companies and industry, politics and policy, technology, and markets and finance — cover the world. We thought about every business story and where they would fit. I challenge you to come up with a story that can’t fit in one of those sections.
5. How will the magazine differentiate itself from Forbes or Fortune?
I don’t really think of them as competition, and I don’t say that out of anger. We are a weekly business news magazine. Those guys have gotten out of the game, for better or worse.
6. How will BusinessWeek content differ from Bloomberg News content?
It’s different in the sense that we have different readers. The Bloomberg terminal customers pay a lot of money to get content that’s specifically focused for them. It’s just as important to do that for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and we’re going to know our readers. Their focus is different. It’s understanding the mindset at which people are approaching our content.
7. How much content will the magazine typically have from Bloomberg writers?
I have no idea. And I am not thinking of my staff vs. their staff. We are one staff. We talk just as much to editors at Bloomberg News as we do at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. With the writers, it’s all about who has the story.
8. What will be the role of Bloomberg’s worldwide resources for the magazine?
It’s amazing. There are 1700 reporters in 146 bureaus and 72 countries. And not only are they covering something specific that they’re the world’s greatest expert on, but they’re enthusiastic. They want to be in BusinessWeek. It increases their exposure, and it opens doors with sources for them. Having that firepower, it’s pretty incredible.
When you’re doing a story in Africa and China, or the U.S. — in Washington we have 170 journalists — the depth of your reporting is so much greater. The challenge, and great attraction of this job, is to get that out there for our readers.
9. What are the specific areas of content that you want the magazine to own?
It came down to picking the entire universe for our reader. Those areas are global economics, company coverage, technology politics and policy, markets and finance. Those are subjects that subdivide very cleanly that you can get everything. We understand that not all of our readers are interested in all of those categories. We want them to know where what they want is available. Our job is to make browsing our magazine very simple.
10. Who do you see as the core BusinessWeek reader?
I think it’s leaders and people who want to be leaders. It’s people who want information to be able to compete.
New Bloomberg.com a step in the right direction
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Douglas McIntyre, the editor of 24/7WallStreet.com, likes the appearance and features in the newly redesigned Bloomberg.com
McIntyre writes, “The lack of clutter is only one of two strengths of the new Bloomberg.com. The layout of the site does not include an overwhelming amount of numerical data about the stock market indexes – Bloomberg knows that that kind of information is a commodity that runs at all other financial sites. What Bloomberg.com does run in the form of statistics is now in the right rail of the site and does not interrupt the flow of news copy.
“The greatest appeal to the new site is what was always its greatest strength: coverage. Only now it displays the breadth of Bloomberg’s existing news coverage more clearly. Unlike news sites which look like newspapers or magazines transplanted to the Internet, Bloomberg.com is spartan and favors written copy over photos or video. It is clear what the editors think is important because text runs down the center of the site in a series of headlines with brief summaries for each story. Old news is quickly pushed off the page by the most recent information.
“The only real quarrel with the design is that there are so many stories in the main well that valuable sections like ‘Opinion,’ ‘Politics,’ and ‘Economy’ get pushed to the bottom of the page. However, that is a minor blemish in what turned out to be an overwhelmingly successful redesign.”
Read more here.
Behind the Bloomberg.com redesign
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Jay Yarow of The Business Insider interviewed Kevin Krim, head of Bloomberg.com, about the changes being made to the site and the ultimate goal for Bloomberg News.
Here is an excerpt:
BI: How many stories hit Bloomberg.com each day? What is that in relation to all the news you produce for the terminal business?
KK: There’s 500 stories a day on Bloomberg.com. 5,000 hits per day for the terminals, so the site gets about 10%. The terminals get really deep financial articles. Bloomberg.com has a different audience. Some of the deep finance stories aren’t for executives we appeal to.
We’re also focusing on aggregation. We’ll link to third party sites if we think its relevant to our audience, we’ll show it, no matter who it’s done by. There’s not a lot of options for business people. When they wake up in the morning, we want to be their one stop.
BI: So, basically you want to kill your rivals like the Wall Street Journal, FT, Reuters?
KK: That’s the idea.
BI: Is the website a profitable operation?
KK: Bloomberg.com is profitable. Adding BusinessWeek and scale makes it more profitable. Advertisers love our audience. We deliver high quality content, we have a large audience, an influential audience.
Read more here.
New Bloomberg site design ready
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David Kaplan of PaidContent.org has some details about the new Bloomberg News site, which can be previewed here and is much brighter than the forboding black site it currently uses.
Kaplan writes, “Aside from replacing the dark background with a lighter one, the updated site will be sporting the Online Publishers Association pushdown ad unit, a larger display format intended to attract higher CPM ads. While Bloomberg’s business is built on its subscription terminals to financial firms, the new site is part of a plan to widen its appeal to a more general audience of business professionals to help it better compete against the likes of Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones/WSJ.
“The other phases of the redesign will be rolled out over the next few months. In addition to the online magazine-like presentation of news headlines, the new site also promises auto-assist search and more eye-catching videos. The increased profile of its videos is also meant to promote another important part of Bloomberg’s multimedia strategy: that is, building up its business news TV channel to better challenge CNBC.”
Read more here.
Forbes turns to design consultant for overhaul
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Peter Kafka of All Things Digital writes Thursday that Forbes Media has brought in Lewis DVorkin, a former editor at the business publisher, as a consultant for a redesign of the Forbes Web site ‘and other editorial areas.’
Kafka writes, “That’s a bit weird because DVorkin already has a day job: He’s the founder and CEO of True/Slant, a news network/aggregator/publisher he launched last year.
“And it makes sense given that Forbes Media is one of True/Slant’s financial backers. Employees there say COO Tim Forbes has been particularly enamored of True/Slant’s low-cost, high-frequency approach to content generation, so you can read into this move what you will.
“DVorkin started showing up at editorial meetings this week, I’m told. I’m also told that both Forbes magazine editor Bill Baldwin and Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment are reporting to him. ‘All I know is that it means we failed to fix our own problems,’ an employee there tells me.”
Read more here.
BusinessWeek overhaul accomplishes its goals
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Marion Maneker of The Big Money likes what has been done to Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine.
“For the BusinessWeek reader, there’s easier access to a broader range of information from around the world, with a level of detail and specificity that would satisfy any middle manager on the make.
“BBW makes the most of its upfront stories with punchy, memorable shorts on companies, like Roben Farzad’s excellent piece from the debut issue on the unnecessary $35 million in interest payments the New York Times has to pay. They’ve even squeezed in Bloomberg’s broadcast assets, with interview excerpts from Charlie Rose (who records his show from Bloomberg’s studio) and radio host Tom Keene.
“On top of all that, the magazine has a feature well that combines some of the best attributes of what BusinessWeek did well, while reviving the kinds of narrative features that made Fortune a standout (and that, for some reason, Fortune has moved away from).”
Read more here.