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| BusinessWeek Cover stories |
| The best time I ever had working was at BusinessWeek, a really extraordinary community of people who care about important things and know an amazing amount about them. From top to bottom, it was the smartest, nicest group of people I've ever been part of. I was the lead author for four BusinessWeek cover stories. My first, 2003's The E-Biz Surprise, was matched on The Economist's cover a year later. BW was a place that let people think for themselves and swing for the fences, and in this case we hit a home run with a completely contrarian cover; Intel's Andy Grove wrote to my boss to congratulate us on our guts. The 2004 follow-up cover E-Biz Strikes Again (I wanted to call it Return of the Amazons, but the pop-art movie poster cover I wanted didn't fly), chronicled how startups were again beginning to stalk old-line industries now that the Web was profitable. Strikes Again was a team effort that featured Blue Nile and salesforce.com right before their IPOs -- not a bad combination, since both shares quintupled by 2007, while salesforce's rival Siebel was sold and Blue Nile's rival Zale has gone through two CEOs and a near-continuous restructuring. For fun, our piece on Internet telephony said Vonage would never make money, because telephony would be dominated by traditional giants as it moved online. Barron's followed two of the six pieces in this package within a few months, including a cover story. In between, I profiled Barry Diller. In each case, follow the links to the related items to see the online extras, sidebars and tables that round out the way BusinessWeek tells stories, especially cover stories. My favorite, though, is 2005's The Digital Hospital. I was in treatment for cancer when my boss Peter Elstrom asked me to think about how information technology could change health care. That took me to Hackensack University Medical Center for a story that would win the New York Press Club and Excellence in Technology Journalism awards, get the doctor I put on the cover invited to help craft e-health legislation and regulations for the U.S. and Japan, and be followed on the cover of U.S. News and World Report's Best Hospitals issue six months later. I also got mail from three continents, most of it about the the first-person piece I did about how poor information-sharing in my own care nearly killed me. A bonus: My co-author Arlene Weintraub did a little sidebar for BW Online about a startup neither of us had heard of called Athenahealth. Two years later, Athena would stage the most successful U.S. tech IPO since the last gasps of the 2000 bubble, doubling on its first trading day. Our piece was the first national press they ever got: This year they were on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and got 15 minutes on Mad Money with Jim Cramer. But you met them here first. |
