The end of business journalism as we know it?

November 3, 2009

In the business world, the news and the media that cover it are moving in different directions. After shrinking in the last year, the nation’s gross domestic product grew by 3.5 percent for the quarter that ended in September, the government reported Thursday. Orders for durable goods rose 22.3 percent at an annual rate, and housing sales were up 23.4 percent. But as New York Times columnist David Carr reports, even with business rebounding, business journalism is collapsing.

Forbes magazine, for example, announced last week it was cutting a quarter of its already decimated staff. The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau — long known for providing important business coverage. And BusinessWeek was sold for parts to Bloomberg a few weeks ago, Carr reports.

Covering business with heroic narratives has likely become a curio of the past. Business magazines used to relish explaining Wall Street’s latest complex and highly lucrative financial instruments, but now it’s clear that the titans who wielded those obscure tools had no idea what they were doing. After being bailed out with tens of billions in taxpayer dollars, those former Masters of the Universe now have less social cachet than welfare recipients, Carr writes.

Business coverage has traditionally offered readers the possibility that they, too, could one day be lauded in magazines like Fortune, Money, Fast Company and Wired. But now, Carr writes, “nobody is going to read, let alone aspire to, magazines called Middled, Outsourced, Left Behind and Clobbered.” —Greg Beaubien

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