Bloomberg Businessweek

• 1. Introduction

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  Bloomberg Businessweek hit newsstands in New York City in September 1929 - weeks before the stock market crash that would define the era it was born into. That timing was not coincidental. It was uncanny. A magazine about business, launched at the precise moment American capitalism was about to be tested more severely than at any point in living memory. The questions this raises are not small ones: How does a publication survive when the world it covers implodes? What happens when the magazine's own fortunes mirror the volatile markets it reports on? And what kind of editorial vision does it take to turn a struggling trade journal into one of the most visually distinctive and controversial business publications in the world?

• 2. Born Into Crisis

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  The Business Week was founded on a simple premise: business managers needed a reliable source of information about what was happening in commerce, finance, and labor. Early sections of the magazine covered marketing, labor, finance, and management. One section called Washington Outlook made it among the first publications to treat national political issues as directly relevant to the business world. The name was shortened to Business Week in 1934, a year when the United States was still deep inside the Great Depression.

  The magazine's original audience was professional managers, but by the 1970s editors had broadened their target. By 1975, the publication was carrying more advertising pages annually than any other magazine in the United States. That commercial achievement reflected a strategic decision to reach consumers outside the strict business community - a pivot that transformed the magazine's scale and ambition.

• 3. The Shepard Years

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  Stephen B. Shepard took the editor-in-chief chair in 1984 and held it for more than two decades, until 2005. Under his leadership, readership grew to more than six million in the late 1980s. That figure made Businessweek one of the most widely read business publications in the country.

  Shepard left the magazine when he was chosen to become the founding dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His successor was Stephen J. Adler, who came from The Wall Street Journal. In 1988, during Shepard's tenure, the magazine launched its annual rankings of United States business school MBA programs. That rankings franchise expanded in 2006 when Businessweek began publishing annual ratings of undergraduate business programs alongside the MBA list. Those rankings became a major driver of reputation and attention, particularly among business school administrators.

• 4. Sale and Reinvention

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  Advertising revenues collapsed by roughly one-third by the start of 2009, and circulation dropped to 936,000 as the late-2000s recession tightened its grip. McGraw-Hill, which owned the magazine, hired Evercore Partners in July 2009 to manage a sale. Because of the liabilities attached to the publication, analysts suggested it might change hands for as little as $1 to an investor willing to absorb ongoing losses.

  Bloomberg L.P. stepped in and bought the magazine in late 2009 for a reported price of between $2 million and $5 million, plus the assumption of liabilities. News reports published in 2019 suggested McGraw-Hill received the high end of that range - $5 million - along with the debt assumption. The new owner renamed the publication Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and in early 2010 restyled the title again as Bloomberg Businessweek, with a lowercase 'w', as part of a broader redesign. Even after the acquisition, the magazine was reported to be losing around $30 million per year - roughly half the $60 million it was losing in 2009.

• 5. A Distinct Visual Identity

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  Richard Turley, as creative director, was largely responsible for cultivating the bold, eclectic, and playful visual personality that came to define Bloomberg Businessweek in the years following its acquisition. Rob Vargas took over the creative director role from 2014. Deputy creative director Tracy Ma joined in 2011 and remained through 2016, working on over 200 issues during her tenure.

  The magazine collected recognition for this reinvention. In 2011, Adweek named it the top business magazine in the United States. The following year, the National Magazine Awards gave Bloomberg Businessweek the general excellence award for general-interest magazines. Also in 2012, editor Josh Tyrangiel - who had come from a deputy managing editor role at Time magazine - was named magazine editor of the year by Ad Age. In 2014, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers gave the publication a Best in Business award for magazines in the general excellence category. In 2016, the Online Journalism Awards recognized Bloomberg Businessweek's explanatory reporting on a piece called "What Is Code?"

• 6. The Big Hack Controversy

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  On the 4th of October 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published an article by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley titled "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies." The piece claimed that China had compromised dozens of technology corporations, including Amazon and Apple, by embedding an extra integrated circuit on a Supermicro server motherboard during manufacturing.

  Pingwest, a media company founded in Silicon Valley and based in Beijing, identified the chip described in the article as a balun and argued that its physical size made any form of attack functionally impossible - it lacked the storage capacity needed to hold commands that could infiltrate hardware. By 2 p.m. on the day of publication, Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro had each issued blanket denials, which Bloomberg reported. Within the week, the United States Department of Homeland Security said it had no reason to question those denials. The National Security Agency, along with the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters and National Cyber Security Centre, also rejected the article's claims. In 2021, Bloomberg published a follow-up article that stood by its original allegations.

• 7. Global Reach and Later Transitions

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  International editions of Businessweek circulated in Europe and Asia until 2005, when the regional print editions were suspended in favor of customized European and Asian versions of the website. That same year, a Russian edition launched in collaboration with Rodionov Publishing House. Businessweek also partnered with InfoPro Management - a publishing and market research firm based in Beirut, Lebanon - to produce an Arabic-language edition distributed across 22 Arab countries.

  In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek announced a Polish-language edition called Bloomberg Businessweek Polska, and relaunched a Chinese edition in November of that year. Also in 2011, the magazine launched an iPad version using Apple's subscription billing service, becoming the first publication to use this method of subscription through an iTunes account. The iPad edition attracted over 100,000 subscribers. Brad Stone was appointed editor in January 2024, the same month the magazine shifted to biweekly publishing. By June 2024, the publication became a monthly, appearing twelve times a year.