‘How are we doing?’

When walking around town, former New York Mayor Ed Koch often would ask constituents, “How am I doing?”…

When walking around town, former New York Mayor Ed Koch often would ask constituents, “How am I doing?”

Taking a page from the mayor, I use industry events, including the recent Morningstar In-vestment Conference in Chicago, to ask our financial adviser constituents, “How are we doing?”

I ask what they like and don’t like about InvestmentNews. Even more importantly, I ask readers to tell me what is missing: what is it that we are NOT delivering, either in print or online.

Only by finding out what readers need and want — and then delivering a solution — can we keep pace with the changing world of advisers.

At Morningstar, several advisers who described themselves as loyal readers of the weekly print edition of the newspaper told me they don’t visit the InvestmentNews website. While they receive and read the IN Daily news blast, which links to the site, they said they were either too busy to seek out the site or weren’t aware of what we offer.

When I started to detail some of the content we provide online only, these same advisers became very interested.

If you are like the print-oriented advisers I spoke with in Chicago, you may find some of the material appearing only on investmentnews.com particularly useful.

First and foremost, there is news. About 15 news stories are posted on the site each day, most of them appearing exclusively on investmentnews.com and not in our weekly print edition.

Our web stories are written to deliver unfolding financial events to advisers quickly and concisely. Each day, we take our top stories and send them to readers in our IN Daily e-mail blast at 4 p.m. Eastern Time.

In addition to news, investmentnews.com offers exclusive, online only content and resources. This includes Retirement Center, which provides a wealth of information about retirement income and other retirement matters; INRetirement, the home of two practical and insightful retirement columns; INPractice, our practice management hub where week-by-week programs help you improve the way you do business; OpINion Online, with its unique take on the advisory world; Tech Bits, a weekly look at technology for advisers; and Consuelo Mack/ Wealthtrack, where one of television’s top financial journalists speaks with today’s leading money managers on video.

We also offer two e-newsletters, Regulatory Alert and IN Tech.

Building on our efforts to provide advisers with timely, useful information and business solutions, we recently added an online discussion component to our site, which we call IN the community.

If you go to investmentnews .com/community, you will be able to participate in online discussions with other dedicated users and our editorial staff.

You can post questions and comments, respond to the questions and comments of other advisers, recommend products and services or simply sound off.

Because many of our readers face similar professional challenges, we feel that IN the community will provide a forum for advisers to share ideas and, hopefully, expand the knowledge base for everyone.

For example, if an adviser were facing an audit by the Securities and Exchange Commission, he or she might start an online dialogue with other community members who may have gone through an audit recently and could provide insights from their own experiences.

Similarly, stories appearing in InvestmentNews in print that call out for adviser comment and input will be tagged so that readers can go to IN the community and continue the discussion.

As with all our efforts, we ask for your support. For IN the community to become a useful resource, we need our dedicated readers, all of whom have deep knowledge of the financial advisory industry, to contribute and share their experiences and knowledge.

If you feel strongly about any issue, I invite you to go to investmentnews.com/community and start a discussion. If you would like to explore our online resources, simply go to investmentnews.com.

And if you want to tell me how we’re doing, just drop me an e-mail at [email protected].

Jim Pavia is editor of InvestmentNews.