Opinion

Broadening our – and your – horizons

As financial advisers are aware from their own businesses, success never comes to those who stand still.

As financial advisers are aware from their own businesses, success never comes to those who stand still. Here at InvestmentNews, our continued success rides on our ability to keep pace with the changing needs and expectations of our readers.

Although our bedrock principles remain the same — presenting relevant news and useful information that is fair, reliable and consistent — we constantly look for ways to better serve our readers.

A little more than a year ago, we redesigned our print product to enhance its readability and usefulness. Online, we continue to expand and improve investmentnews.com.

For those readers who principally turn to us in print, let me give you a fast update of the changes on our website.

First, we have beefed up our daily news content. On average, we post 20 stories a day.

To deliver the day’s top stories, we e-mail a news blast, IN Alert, at 4 p.m. ET. And whenever a major news story breaks, we send out a special news bulletin.

We also provide our readers with two e-newsletters, Regulatory Alert and IN Tech.

In addition, investmentnews.com is home to a wealth of resources, including the Retirement Center, the ETF Center and Consuelo Mack’s WealthTrack, which provides video interviews with the nation’s top money managers and financial leaders. Finally, there are our exclusive online columns: INPractice, OpINion Online, INRetirement, IN: TECHbits and tax INsight — and our opinion poll.

Contrary to the fears of some pundits that the Internet spells the end of print, the InvestmentNews team believes that each medium has its unique strengths, and that far from being rivals, online and print complement one another. In fact, the Internet presents us with opportunities to reach out and engage our readers in ways we never could before.

For example, have you ever wanted to give us or other advisers a piece of your mind? Now you can do it right at your computer in one of two ways.

First, you can comment on any story that appears on our site by simply going to the note in red that says “Post a Comment.” Click on that, register to get a user name and password, and you are in.

You can also take part in an interactive forum on investmentnews.com that we call “IN the community.”

This is social networking, adviser style. Simply click on the “IN the community” box and follow the instructions.

To be sure, the comments you post aren’t lost in cyberspace. Whichever way you share your thoughts, they are very important to other advisers and to us.

Your comments assist us in developing story ideas and, in some cases, turning us on to developments we weren’t aware were taking place.

I know that many advisers have come to rely on our e-mails. In fact, one adviser I met at a recent industry event told me that he finds IN Alert “a necessary distraction.” When I pressed him for further explanation, he said: “I make sure everyone in the office stops working and takes a few minutes to read the paper’s alert. If we don’t, I feel like we would miss something.”

That’s the kind of endorsement an editor loves to hear. (I half-jokingly asked him to put it in writing and send it to my boss.) So if you like our e-mails, I invite you to try our other online tools and features — and to be on the lookout for even more.

Jim Pavia is the editor of InvestmentNews.