Bloomberg Businessweek December 23, 2019
warningin“RethinkingChina,”a March4,1996,coverstory.“Apatternof
disturbing behavior—fromsaber-rattling over Taiwan to strong-arming
Westernbusiness—iscausingconcernaboutChina’sswiftlygrowingpower,”
thesubhead read.
Having lived through a few decades,
we’ve seen bull markets like the present
one before and know that, at some point
it will end and, as we wrote last year, “we’ll
startbydescribingitsdemise”—thecrashof
2020-something. Or maybe we’ll get really
lucky, like the Australians, who’ve been wait-
ing 30 years for the next recession. But we
digress. (At 90, I guess we are allowed to.)
What’s really been flowing through our
veins all these decades, and something
that’s defined our coverage since the begin-
ning of this century—especially during our
time as Bloomberg Businessweek—is an
obsession with innovation and change. It’s
why “Sooner Than You Think” became one
ofourfavoritefranchises,why our Emmy-nominated video series Hello
WorldgetsmillionsofhitsonYouTube, and why we memorialized Jobs with a
specialad-freeissueuponhisdeath. Ideas and insights—that’s our currency.
Themagazinehas obviously long covered founders and
CEOs,executivesand management, industries and products.
We’vedividedthestaff into beats, and “the book” into corre-
sponding sections. All of that was to orga-
nize the news, to tame the torrent of the
times. We’re first and foremost a U.S. mag-
azine, yet we’ve also broadened ourselves
into a global business publication, one with
an American perspective that makes use of
Bloomberg LP’s best assets: valuable data
and talented people. Beyond the print mag-
azine, we’re a big part of bloomberg.com;
we also produce a TV show, a radio show,
and a podcast; and we have millions of fol-
lowers on social media.
We know we’ve been fortunate to live
as long as we have. Which is why we
want to say thank you—to you, our read-
ers,aswellasourstaffers,contributors,
advertisers, and anybody else we’ve ever
touched. We value you and the time you
give us, and we look forward to engag-
ing with you for many more issues in the
decades to come. <BW>79● 2010
Bloomberg Businessweek
debuts on April 26. “We
had a great redesign and
a bunch of really terrible
covers under glass,”
Tyrangiel recalls. “Then we
got some breaking news
about Goldman Sachs,
so at least we looked
relevant. But honestly?
There was much better
work to come.”
● 2013
Hank: Five Years From the Brink,
a documentary featuring former
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson,
commemorates the anniversary of the
start of the global financial crisis.● 2015
“What Is Code?” For the
first (and still only) time,
the magazine devotes an
entire issue to one article,
Paul Ford’s 38,000-word
essay on software and
programming culture.● 2018
Beginningwitha
Businessweek cover story,
a multipart investigative
series by Bloomberg
News on the merchant
cash-advance industry
triggers probes by state
and federal authorities
and a law banning one
of the industry’s most
abusive practices.
● 2019
Cover trail returns!● 2016
Silicon Valley
correspondent Ashlee
Vance in March launches
an online video series,
Hello World, that tours
global tech hubs.● 2015
On Oct. 1, Ellen Pollock
becomes the magazine’s
first female editor-in-chief.● 2011
Upon Steve Jobs’s death,
the staff throws away
an entire issue before
it prints and, overnight,
cranks out a special one
to commemorate him.▼ 2010s
● 2013-16
“There was a time, around 2013–16, when the most experimental
magazine in the world wasn’t some Berlin fashion zine that doused
its models in crude oil but Bloomberg Businessweek, a once-dowdy
battleship of American journalism,” says a publication of AIGA, the
professional association for design.