Good article in the NY Times about traditional media business publications reducing staff and coverage. The usual reasons - lack of advertising, readers fleeing print publications for online, etc. - are given for the decline.
The article goes on to talk about readers being less interested in business news.
This simply isn't true. If you add in business coverage coming from new media companies like TechCrunch and others, you find that overall business related media coverage and readership has increased over the last decade.
What is true is there much less reader interest in print. But like many articles coming from traditional media, they mistake traditional media's business model and distribution problems with a lack of demand.
But one place this shift has definitely led to a decline is the quality of the reporting and writing. The paragraph below from the NY Times article is a great example of prose you rarely see in new media:
Business coverage has been, at its heart, aspirational, a brand promise that suggests that if you clip the right articles, internalize the right rhetoric, then you too will end up as one of the shiny, happy people striding boldly across the pages of magazines with names like Fortune, Money, Fast Company and Wired. But nobody is going to read, let alone aspire to, magazines called Middled, Outsourced, Left Behind and Clobbered.
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