From Capital New York@Politico:
Henry Blodget spent the past eight years transforming Business Insider from a scrappy three-man show into a new-media heavyweight that has come to represent the potential for journalism startups in the digital age.
He will spend the next five trying to make it a global financial-news powerhouse with a subscription component, regional editions throughout Europe and Asia, a headcount that could top 1,300 by the end of 2020, and maybe even a television presence.
"The financial publication of record for the digital generation" is how Blodget described his vision to POLITICO during an interview recently at Business Insider's Manhattan headquarters. (Neither The Wall Street Journal nor The Financial Times had a comment when asked what they thought about that.)
Business Insider these days lives in a 40,000-square-foot, two-story command center with a well stocked commissary and the requisite ping-pong annex—the type of modern, open-concept office where standing desks and transparent-glass dry-erase walls are conspicuous.
That's a far cry from the series of cramped confines where the company essentially squatted during its first year of existence in 2007—a dim loading dock, then a windowless temp space, and so on. When this reporter worked at Business Insider for a stretch in 2010, the editorial staff of about two-dozen had just about maxed out a modest-sized room, with Blodget working at a small filing cabinet rather than be cloistered away from his journalists in a separate office. (Even today, Blodget's spot in the center of Business Insider's capacious bullpen is a nod to the new workplace egalitarianism, his laptop perched atop a miniature end-table perched atop a startup-sized desk.)
Recently acquired by the Berlin-based European publishing conglomerate Axel Springer at an eye-popping valuation of $442 million, Business Insider has moved past the rebellious, sometimes awkward growing pains of its adolescence and has matured into something that's starting to look as fancy and formidable as the legacy media stalwarts it set out to disrupt....MOREHT: Ritholtz@Bloomberg
