You can't time a launch date any better than you can time the market, but clearly the team at The Big Money selected a fairly adventurous day to launch their new financial news portal today.
The Big Money is a new offering from Slate.com. Editor Jim Ledbetter is a veteran financial journalist with experience at CNN Money, Time and the Industry Standard, among others. When I spoke with Jim a few weeks ago, he described The Big Money as "a financial news site with Slate.com's sensibility and voice". They're targeting a younger audience than the traditional financial news sites and are placing a particular emphasis on the impact of finance and business on the environment, technology and related areas. They've also provided a socially responsible investing screener that allows users to see how companies rank on that scale.
I'm sure that even in their wildest dreams, Jim and the Big Money team didn't anticipate spending launch day penning posts about Lehman's impending bankrupcty and BofA's (NYSE: BAC) acquisition of Merrill Lynch (NYSE:MER).
Is there room for another financial news site on the web? It's a crowded market but The Big Money is targeting a different niche, what they refer to as the Facebook demographic. While it took a while for Slate.com to find its voice, I now read it regularly and think there's an opportunity for them to extend the brand to business and finance.
You can read more about The Big Money in this morning's New York Times article. Good luck to The Big Money on their launch.
Author's Note: Jim Ledbetter will be one of the panelists on the financial blogging panel that I am moderating at BlogWorld Expo next Saturday. If you haven't booked your seat yet, you can still get a 20% discount on BlogWorld registration by entering the code B8GBTCC on the BlogWorld registration page.
