Two weeks ago, BusinessWeek magazine announced a design “relaunch”, in which they hoped to change the subject matter of the print magazine (removing some general interest stuff, expanding global business coverage) and change the magazine’s content from the old-media magazine style they had been working with for so long into a more blog/web-inspired style mimicking their website.

While the redesign is, as Bloomberg points out, basically a grab for more ad revenue (isn’t everything, though?), it will ultimately not bring in the fresh young business types (or ad revenue) they’re looking for if the new style isn’t more interesting and helpful than the old magazine, or, more importantly, more interesting than BusinessWeek’s and competing websites.

So, is it? I gave BusinessWeek a week with the new design to get the kinks out and picked up the Oct. 29th issue to see if this is something other magazines should try out.

First off, typography-, layout-, color-wise, I like it. I’m not an expert on those things, but it all looked clean and modern and cool to me. Very minimalistic, very easy to read. Anyway, onto the content!

The Business Week

The first section of the magazine, even before the masthead, is a new section called “The Business Week,” a four page section of about twenty short news blurbs. Most of them have references at the bottom, either to other pages in the issue, a generic businessweek.com/magazine url, or to totally different publications. I don’t like this section very much.

The problem is that the blurbs take the style of a blog post, summarizing a bunch stories down to their essences, but they fail at the “what next?” question. News blogs work so well because you can basically preview a story and if you’re interested in it you click the link and you have an entire article or website to delve deeper into. In The Business Week you can either read the article later in the issue, which makes the blurb a glorified table of contents, or go to the landing page/news blog at businessweek.com/magazine, which is a pain, having to switch mediums, or you can go to a totally other publication, as when, after a summary titled “‘Friend’ of the Court,” it directs you to the Oct. 15 edition of The National Law Journal. While I recognize the referents to a blog post, I don’t think they translate well to the print medium.

Summaries like this work in magazines like Maxim when you’re talking about guys who accidentally set their houses/pets/friends on fire — stories you don’t have to know more about after you’ve gotten the punchline — but with real news, and especially with business news, there needs to be the promise of something more in-depth.

BTW

BTW is the short blurb section that works well in the new BusinessWeek. It’s interesting, light and quirky. After reading a whole paragraph about someone selling Stalin’s secret police chief’s train car, I don’t really care anymore. And it’s only one page front and back!

Facetime

Facetime, written by Maria Bartiromo — anchor of CNBC’s Closing Bell — is what magazines are about. Her interview of U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is one of the highlights of the issue.

One thing magazines are good at doing is using their position as a magazine to get interviews with people in power. Websites just don’t have the name recognition with these people’s handlers to get them to agree to interviews, so I like that BusinessWeek is leveraging the respect that print has in the popular mindset to sit down with the treasury secretary.

The problem is, though, how much longer will this last? In the next ten — maybe five — years people are going to start realizing that popular websites can be just as legitimate as any print publication, and print won’t have the upper hand anymore in getting to talk to these people. Once a handful of original news websites begin to stand out from the rest in the popular consciousness, magazines will have a harder time getting these people to sit down. (Is it already happening with TMZ on the entertainment beat?)

In Depth

I also love the In Depth section. Magazines have the resources, and the reader’s attention span, to print these long analysis pieces. I only wish there were more than three of them each issue.

Links

Not really a section of the magazine, links are small pullout asides where BusinessWeek highlights what other news sources are reporting about any given story. They succeed at giving alternate perspectives to stories and answering the questions, “How are other sources reporting this story?” and “What isn’t considered in this story that may be important?” Links was a good addition.

Feedback

Feedback is another section of the magazine I don’t like, especially since it was more or less botched this week. The problem with print deadlines is that when Apple announces it’s going to open the iPhone to third-party developers on a Wednesday, your section about how you won’t buy an iPhone because it’s not open to third-party developers goes out the window.

The part of the Feedback section I dislike is not the letters to the editor, but the section where they print comments from BusinessWeek online. In this case they’re comments to a column about not wanting to buy an iPhone. I don’t know whether it’s that I’m not used to seeing web comments in a print medium (I’m not) or that I’m not convinced of the legitimacy of web comments (I’m not), but the comments BusinessWeek chose here seem like a pretty standard cross-section of stupid Internet comments. They range from the totally off-topic, to the fanboy (“you will be uncool [without an iPhone]“) to the unbearably harsh (“I was given [an iPhone] for my birthday and had the person return it. A great gift, but no thank you.”).

Comments have worked hard to eke out their space on the Internet, and I’d rather they stay there if the best they can find on the BusinessWeek site is this stuff.

In all, though, I like the new BusinessWeek. The missteps seem to be when the redesigners took the charge to make the magazine more “webby” too literally. There are ways in which magazines are better than the web, and instead of trying to bridge the gap between magazine and website, they should have tried to emphasize what makes magazines different and great.

I’m curious to see the next time a major magazine redesigns and how they approach it. Taking visual design cues from the web is great — the most exciting visual design is going on online nowadays — but I hope they hold back from taking content cues from the Internet. There are good reasons the separate mediums have evolved how they have.