If there ever was a magazine that should have been primarily online and primarily a community, it was Business 2.0. But no, it’s dead now. And that’s a shame.
Why the hell it didn’t start online or transition to online is beyond me. Business 2.0 should not have been a product but a community; it could have been the magazine that shows how that’s done. It even had a community on Facebook eager to save it. But, sadly, this magazine was made by a 1.0 company that just didn’t understand how to think like a place instead of a thing.
This being a product of Time Inc., I suspect that politics also played a role. (That’s on my mind as I teach my CUNY course in entrepreneurial journalism and for the first class, I took the students through the saga of starting Entertainment Weekly.) Time Inc. refused to sell Business 2.0 to Mansueto Ventures, publisher of Fast Company and Inc., which are competitive. And Fortune, inside Time Inc., is also competitive. So out went the baby with the bathwater. Too bad.
