I’ve been doing some blogging lately at BusinessWeek Online about Toxic Bosses,
and will be doing so for the next few weeks with Ben Dattner and Annie McKee. There is also blogging by
various experts — along with lots of comments from readers — on other business at work issues including work-life balance, staying entrepreneurial, time
management, negotiating bureaucracy, and generational issues. Blogging in concert with what is published in
a major magazine like BusinessWeek
isn’t new. In fact, BusinessWeek has been the
leader among major business magazine in producing diverse and high quality online
content — light years ahead of Fortune, for example. BUT they really going to
extremes to produce their summer double issue on Business@Work, using a kind of modified Wisdom of
Crowds or “open source” approach.
Michelle Conlin,
the BusinessWeek editor I am working with,
puts it that this way: “We are reverse engineering the news-gathering process.
Rather than us going out to craft and gather the story, we are going to let
readers guide us through their questions and comments on our blogs online.
Coupled with posts from experts, we will use the material generated online to
create the print version. It's the opposite of how we normally do things.”
How about that? I have often accused people in the
publishing industry of a stunning lack of courage and creativity (The second
paragraph of Weird Ideas
That Work introduces an example of a publishing firm that wants to innovate, but doesn’t
have the will to do so. In essence, they wanted the money from creativity, but
didn’t want to take any risks). BusinessWeek
is taking a substantial risk with this approach, and I applaud their courage. Check-out these blogs and make some comments — you may end-up in the pages of BusinessWeek
in a couple months!
P.S. Here is a press release about it.
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