BusinessWeek.com's EIC Talks Career and Online Innovation

John Byrne, Editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com, opens up to David Hirschman of Mediabistro.com about his interest and career in business journalism and about what's next for online publishing.
Byrne, the author or co-author of eight business books, has a long career in business publications. In addition to his time at BusinessWeek, both in print and online, Byrne also
has served as editor-in-chief of Fast Company.
From the article posted today:

What got you on the business journalism track originally?
[Starting in college] I kind of knew I wanted to get into business journalism for competitive and ambitious reasons, and for reasons that most journalists get into this field -- because they think they can reform or get things done for the better. Everyone wanted to write about politics, and because I knew that's where the crowd was, I didn't want to go where the crowd was. The second reason was that when I sat back and looked at what was really going on, I really felt that the people who have the most influence in the way we live and what we do are people in business -- not people in politics. These are the people who determine whether we have meaningful employment and how productive we are as human beings, and how well we live. I felt while I was growing up that it was a less examined part of our society.
What do you see as some of the major challenges for online news brands today?
It's not, as some people say it is, "online vs. print," because the contrasts are actually more insidious and dangerous than that. The more threatening contrast is between aggregation and original content -- because aggregation is something that's cheap. You don't have to pay writers and editors to do it; you can do it automatically, and basically Yahoo, AOL and MSN [as well as Google News] have already won on aggregation. If you look at the reader research, you'll find that readers prefer getting their news and analysis from multiple sources instead of one. The average reader of BusinessWeek content gets news from 20 other brands (includes radio and TV, online and print) on a regular basis. Aggregation just plays to their needs and their wants.

Byrne also discusses BusinessWeek.com's new networking/aggregation product, the Business Exchange, set to launch in early September.
Read the entire article here.