Mediaite has a swell feature on BusinessWeek covers through the decades, from the days when it was called The Business Week, to the economic thermometer days, to recent winning covers. Watch how business has changed in a few short minutes. There are some good ones, including “National Defense Rewrites the Laws” in 1940 (an early warning on the military-industrial complex?) and some really bad ones, like the maudlin crying Statue of Liberty illustration accompanying a Decline of America cover story in 1979. (h/t Chris Roush)
— Did MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman really write that Joanne Lipman, responsible for the brief, turbulent, wasted opportunity that was Portfolio, ought to be a candidate to assume the reins of the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek? Yes, he did.
— The New York Times goes to feature town on the desperate scramble for a single thirteen-buck-an-hour job in Indiana. The job listing was up less than two business days, but five hundred applied to be an administrative assistant at a truck-driving school whose business is up because people are out of work (as my dad would tell you, actual truck-driving work is far from up). College-educated people feel the recession far, far less than everyone else—their unemployment rate is a good-for-everyone-else-in-good-times 4.9 percent—so it’s good that reporter Michael Luo throws this in:
She dropped significantly overqualified candidates right away, reasoning that they would leave when the economy improved. Among them was a former I.B.M. business analyst with 18 years experience; a former director of human resources; and someone with a master’s degree and 12 years at Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm.
— Mark Glaser, digital man, rediscovers the wonders of the print newspaper. Unsurprisingly, four hundred years of refinement have produced a better reading platform than anything yet created on a glowing rectangle—or even a non-glowing Kindle.
Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.