Search Results for: Business

Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing

Longreads Pick

This year’s best in business writing as chosen by Max Chafkin, Burt Helm, and the staff at Longreads.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 21, 2014

Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business writing.

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Max Chafkin
Writer focusing on business and technology.

Schooled (Dale Russakoff, New Yorker)

This piece explores the failed attempt by Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker, among others, to fix Newark’s schools—and in doing so makes clear just how hard education reform is. Most shockingly, it exposes the huge sums of money spent by the city and its supporters on education consultants who managed to extract huge fees without, apparently, doing a whole lot. It’s pretty hard to make a dense story about education reform read well, but Russakoff amazingly manages it, while managing to be fair and incisive. Read more…

How a 26-Year-Old From Dallas Turned Fashion Blogging Into Big Business

Affiliate marketing is almost as old as the Internet; it developed back in 1994 thanks to pornography sites, and it was implemented by Jeff Bezos at Amazon shortly afterward. Here’s how it works: Say you search for flights on Priceline. The hyperlinked airfare results aren’t just any old links. They’re affiliate links. The act of clicking one saves a Priceline cookie to your browser before sending you on to the airline’s website. If you buy the ticket, the airline website will see Priceline’s cookie and will pay Priceline a commission. Affiliate marketing companies like Commission Junction and Linkshare, which created these trackable links, were aimed at developers. A company called Skimlinks made them easier to implement, but it didn’t focus on the fashion market. Baxter, who had interned at a tech start-up in San Francisco, saw an opportunity. If they could make it easy for bloggers to integrate affiliate links to retailers into their posts, everyone involved stood to profit. Retailers could make more sales. Bloggers could earn commissions. And a company that facilitated the transaction and negotiated the commission could take part of the proceeds. After all, many prominent bloggers were already including retail links in their #OOTD (“outfit of the day”) posts anyway.

Sitting at Starbucks, Amber could immediately envision the company. She decided it should be called rewardStyle, and while she was designing the logo on a napkin, Baxter used his iPhone to register the domain name. By February 2011, they had a test platform for the site. She reached out to a few blogger friends and asked them to try it out. “You don’t have to pay anything, you don’t have to sign any contracts, you just have to see if you start making money,” Amber said.

Francesca Mari, writing in Texas Monthly about the business of fashion blogging.

 

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David Sedaris on the Dangerous Business of Naming a Cat

About seven years ago I wrote a story about a cat in a bad mood. And then the next fall another one. So I tried to write a few every year, but for every one that worked, there were two that didn’t. And then, obviously, I stepped it up over the past year and a half, once I got the actual deadline. I set up a few rules for myself. I didn’t want any animal to have a name. If you say that a rabbit’s name was, oh I don’t know, sometimes someone will have a cat, and you ask, “What’s your cat’s name?” And they say, “Critter!” And you think, Oh, I hate your cat. And they say, “Diane.” And you think, I like your cat. So even giving anything a name would invite judgment that I didn’t want. And that made it hard to write sometimes. It’s like the chipmunk and the chipmunk sister. I could see a reader saying, “Which goddamn chipmunk is talking!” But I worked my best, my hardest. You get into that kind of writing that is math. You don’t want to repeat the word too often, but you don’t want to substitute. Instead of saying chipmunk, you don’t want to say spotted rodent. You just can’t do that.

David Sedaris, in a 2010 Vulture interview with Aileen Gallagher.

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Photo: ncbrian, Flickr

Is ‘Shareholder Value’ Bad for Business?

Longreads Pick

What does “shareholder value” really mean, and is it time for us to consider a new measurement for business success?

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Aug 5, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,322 words)

The Painful Business of Running a Franchise

It’s not just the workers who get a lousy deal. Over the years, Bob Baber, the Quiznos franchisee, became increasingly frustrated by the terms of his contract. One of the issues that galled him the most was that Quiznos was allowed to (and did) place additional sub shops in his franchise area, creating what he felt was direct competition that cut into his profits. Baber formed the Quiznos Subs Franchise Association, a sort of franchisees’ union, through which he hoped to leverage better terms. A month later, the Denver-based company terminated Baber’s franchise, claiming his restaurants were not being maintained properly, and other contractual defaults. When a franchise agreement is terminated, all investment by the franchisee—including acquisition cost, equipment, and fees—is effectively flushed away. Baber and Quiznos became enmeshed in a protracted legal struggle, with Baber refinancing his house and spending nearly $100,000. (A public relations spokeswoman representing Quiznos told us it is the company’s position to not comment on any litigation past or present.)

Despite such stories, people still buy into the franchise dream.

Timothy Noah, in Pacific Standard, on the increasingly difficult economics of running your own franchise.

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Photo: thomashawk, Flickr

Taylor Swift Is a Music Business Genius: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

A brief guide to the music business, according to Taylor Swift: Featuring the Wall Street Journal, Planet Money and The New Yorker.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 7, 2014

Taylor Swift Is a Music Business Genius: A Reading List

Taylor Swift has done it again, this time getting Apple to change its streaming deal with artists. Here’s a collection of stories on how the pop star runs the music industry. 

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1. The Future of Music Is a Love Story (Taylor Swift, Wall Street Journal)

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Swift says the future of music will be saved by this—the ability of a star to make millions of real friendships:

There are always going to be those artists who break through on an emotional level and end up in people’s lives forever. The way I see it, fans view music the way they view their relationships. Some music is just for fun, a passing fling (the ones they dance to at clubs and parties for a month while the song is a huge radio hit, that they will soon forget they ever danced to). Some songs and albums represent seasons of our lives, like relationships that we hold dear in our memories but had their time and place in the past.

However, some artists will be like finding “the one.” We will cherish every album they put out until they retire and we will play their music for our children and grandchildren. As an artist, this is the dream bond we hope to establish with our fans. I think the future still holds the possibility for this kind of bond, the one my father has with the Beach Boys and the one my mother has with Carly Simon.

2. The Secret Genius of Taylor Swift (Zoe Chace, Planet Money, 2012)

It’s not just the emotional bonds that will matter—it’s also the ability to thrive in a fragmented world where streaming overtakes individual album sales. Planet Money reported in 2012 that Swift and her team still know the best ways to move albums:

As Paul Resnikoff, editor and founder of Digital Music News points out, she has chosen from the toolbox only the outlets that would give her the most money for every album sold: Outlets that pushed a full album purchase.

The first week her album came out, you could only get it in a few key places: iTunes, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Target. You could order a Papa Johns pizza and receive the CD — at the sticker price of around 14 bucks.

But the tools Swift didn’t use are as important than the ones she did. By refusing to release her singles on Spotify, or any other streaming site, she pushed her fans to buy the album. Spotify pays the artist pennies on the dollar. Taylor Swift skipped it.

3. You Belong With Me (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 2011)

As the New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe noted in 2011, there were early signs that Swift had a keen business sense:

Early on, Swift assumed that she would follow her parents into business. “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was eight, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be,” she recalled, during an online Q. & A. with fans. “We’d be at, like, the first day of school and they’re, like, ‘So what do you guys want to be when you grow up?’ And everybody’s, like, ‘I want to be an astronaut!’ Or, like, ‘I want to be a ballerina!’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m gonna be a financial adviser!’ ” But she eventually had a country-music epiphany, inspired by listening to nineties crossover hits—Faith Hill, Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks. The melodies were good, but she especially liked the storytelling. “It was just such a given—I want to do that!” she said.

4. Taylor Swift Is the Music Industry (Devin Leonard, Bloomberg Businessweek)

After selling 1.29 million copies of her new album 1989, then pulling her music from the streaming service Spotify, Devin Leonard goes to Nashville to meet Scott Borchetta, founder of Swift’s label Big Machine Records, to understand the economics of being a label in 2014:

For that reason, Borchetta and Swift chose to initially withhold 1989 from Spotify. They did the same thing with Red in its early weeks. “We’re not against anybody, but we’re not responsible for new business models,” Borchetta says. “If they work, fantastic, but it can’t be at the detriment of our own business. That’s what Spotify is.”

Photo: evarinaldiphotography, Flickr

When a Successful Business Is One That Can Pay Employees a Decent Wage

At the New York Times, reporters Steven Greenhouse and Stephanie Strom look at businesses that pay their employees well over minimum wage, including In-N-Out burger, which starts employees off at $10.50 an hour, and Boloco, a burrito chain with 22 restaurants in New England:

John Pepper, Boloco’s co-founder, said the strategy for his Boston-based company evolved after it initially adopted a low-wage approach.

“In the company’s early years,” he said, “our goal, like much of the industry, was to pay as little as you can get away with and have people still show up and be reasonably productive.”

But while watching employees mop floors and work late into the night, he realized that for his company to be as great as he hoped, it needed to treat its workers better.

“We were talking about building a culture in which we want our team members to take care of our customers,” Mr. Pepper said. “But we asked, ‘What’s in it for them?’ Honestly, very little.”

So in 2002, when the minimum wage was $5.15 an hour, Boloco raised its minimum pay to $8. It also began subsidizing commuting costs, providing English classes to immigrant employees and contributing up to 4 percent of an employee’s pay toward a 401(k).

“If we really wanted our people to care about our culture and care about our customers, we had to show that we cared about them,” Mr. Pepper said. “If we’re talking about building a business that’s successful, but our employees can’t go home and pay their bills, to me that success is a farce.”

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Photo: Church Street Marketplace

Dealers Inject Business School Basics In Selling Heroin

Longreads Pick

Heroin dealers catering to affluent suburban addicts have shifted their operations from back-alley deals in shady parts of town to delivery on demand at downtown offices, high-end malls and suburban homes. But as the heroin business branches out from sketchy back-alleys, tactics have also changed. Now, drugs are marketed, dealers are trained, and the whole operation has been injected with MBA-style techniques.

Source: USA Today
Published: Jul 2, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,377 words)