Surviving and Thriving Amid Uncertainty

As unemployment heads toward its highest level in decades, homeowners are facing more foreclosures and many companies continue to confront huge challenges. We at Seattle Business magazine feel your pain. In an epidemic that continues today, nearly 2,000 periodicals have closed their doors in the past three years, including Portfolio, a wonderfully written national business journal with 450,000 subscribers. BusinessWeek, where I started my career, survived only by selling itself to Bloomberg.

So how does Seattle Business, with a circulation of just a little more than 30,000, cope in this kind of environment? We endure because you, our readers, are the right 30,000 people. You are the driving force behind business in Washington state, playing key roles in decisions that affect hundreds of millions of dollars in purchases. While national business magazines are weakened by their diffuse readership, we draw strength from our tight focus: the economic, business and policy issues that affect your interests as a business in Washington state.

A magazine is strongest when it is woven into the very fabric of its community of readers. That’s why events are such an important part of what we do. Our Green Washington Awards ceremony recently brought together the companies across our state driving sustainability. Our upcoming Leaders in Health Care program recognizes the executives, institutions and medical professionals who are doing the most to improve our state’s health care system. To select the state’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, we ask tens of thousands of employees to rate their own managers and workplaces. Many businesses use our surveys to benchmark their own progress toward improving their workplaces. And our Top 25 Innovators and Entrepreneurs program last month identified the people and companies who are at the cutting edge.

The events are not only an opportunity to recognize outstanding businesses and individuals, they are also a chance to network and to celebrate the advances we are making as a state. Next year, we will launch a new program called the Washington Manufacturing Awards to recognize the importance of manufacturing companies to our state’s healthy growth. These events help us to learn more about the diverse firms in our state, while binding us closer to the businesses we cover.

Another important arm of our magazine is our website, Seattlebusinessmag.com. We recently relaunched the site as a place for online access to our editorial content, for editors and guest columnists to blog about the state economy, as well as to learn about our various events and keep up with daily business news about the state.

As we move into the holidays, we feel thankful and honored to cover one of the most dynamic, varied and innovative business communities in the world. Through our magazine, our events and our website, we hope to become an integral part of your business life and of the Washington state business community.