I used to love reading BusinessWeek – so much so that I’ve had a subscription to this magazine for about 15 years. Recently I got a renewal notice and for the first time I won’t be renewing.
I still like reading this magazine and because of the Canadian dollar it’s cheaper than it’s ever been but I just don’t get much value out of it anymore.
Back then
I started reading BW back in 1993 – at the time there was no world wide web and even though the www started two years later in 1995, it was a number of years before the web became a pretty good business resource. I liked almost all of its articles since I was very interested in investing and I even had dreams of being a stock analyst when I grew up.
Now
These days I found that I often read very little of each magazine for a few reasons:
- Time – For some reason I just don’t have as much time as I used to have for reading.
- Duplication – There are so many other great business resources on the web such as all the fine blogs I like to read.
- BW online – The magazine is online now so I often read articles of interest before I get the print copy.
- Relevancy – Now that I am a passive investor I don’t have as much interest in hearing about various companies around the world which I used to think of as investment possibilities.
- Non-Canuck – You would be hard pressed to find one mention of Canada in ten issues. The fact that the magazine is not Canadian was one of the reasons I liked it since it provided different material from the Canadian newspapers. However even though Canada is small potatoes in the business world, we are the largest trading partner of the US and it’s hard to understand how little we get mentioned.
The future
I started a subscription last year to MoneySense which is an awesome Canadian financial magazine and I’m really enjoying it. I imagine there will come a time when I let that subscription expire but hopefully that day won’t come anytime soon.