Expect More Multimedia and Less Business as Usual From BusinessWeek under Tyrangiel

By Kyle Austin

November 17th, 2009

At 37, Josh Tyrangiel has quickly worked his way up the journalistic ranks. Today, he becomes the first editor of the Bloomberg-run BusinessWeek. Most recently serving as editor of TIME.com and deputy managing editor of TIME , he was thought to be by many as the heir apparent to Richard Stengel.

The move shouldn’t come as a total shocker given that Norman Pearlstine, Bloomberg’ chief content officer, formerly looked over Tyrangiel’s work as editor-in-chief of Time Inc. We’ve also heard that Jim Kelly, TIME’s former managing editor has been sitting in on the Bloomberg editorial meetings with other former TIME Inc. staff.

Given Tyrangiel’s success with TIME.com, he recently worked with Peter Ha in launching Techland and also boosted the Web site’s traffic to what some expect will be 1.8 billion page views this year, the move is also a show of support for John Byrne who has been driving BusinessWeek.com’s growth and was retained by Bloomberg. Tyrangiel made TIME.com a top consumer, multimedia portal: tying text, audio, pictures and video together with an integrated approach. One of BusinessWeek.com’s top revenue drivers in the past has been ad-supported slides shows – which will likely increase 10-fold (while becoming more interactive) under Tyrangiel’s watch. And judging by the video embedded above, he articulated this approach to his managers and “troops” in a way that resonated.

In addition, if Bloomberg’s goal is to reach a broader consumer audience, beyond Wall Street, with the magazine – Tyrangiel’s non-business background will come into play. He’s a music-critic at heart (not an economist or someone with a Wall Street background), who sat down with music luminaries such as Bono and Kanye West for cover stories, during his time at Rolling Stone.

One of Tyrangiel’s first challenges will be assessing if he can save Business Exchange, BusinessWeek’s information-sharing, social network. According to previous reports, the company has sunk $16 million into the site over the last two years, while drawing only 1.5 million page views on average per month and bringing in $600,000 in revenue last year.

Entry Filed under: BusinessWeek,Mainstream Media,Marketing,Multimedia