The new and improved InvestmentNews.com

Financial advisers know that success never comes to those who stand still. The same can be said here at InvestmentNews, where we think that our continued success rides on our ability to keep pace with the changing needs and expectations of our readers.

Although our principles always remain the same — presenting relevant news and useful information that is fair, reliable and consistent — we are constantly looking for ways to serve our audience better.

Two years ago, we redesigned our print product to enhance its readability and usefulness. At the same time, we continued to expand and improve our website, InvestmentNews.com.

We have beefed up our daily news content, now posting an average of 20 stories a day. To deliver the day’s top stories, we e-mail a news blast, IN Daily, at 4 p.m. ET. Whenever a big story breaks, we send out a special news bulletin.

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

And now, after months of hard work, we have unveiled a reorganized website.

The website will be easier to navigate. All our content will be housed in new sections that are dedicated to specific segments of the financial advisory business.

I invite readers to check out the sections on investment strategies, broker-dealers, registered investment advisers, practice management, wealth and retirement, insurance and regulation.

Additionally, we are collaborating with some leading providers to offer exclusive access to information on mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and options.

Our new market data section will be powered by Morningstar Inc. and will provide advisers with access to fund screeners and detailed analyses of the mutual fund world. Our website will also feature regular picks on options, mutual funds and ETFs provided exclusively by analysts from Standard & Poor’s.

We will have a new InvestmentNews Data Library, which will house our exclusive broker-dealer information and rankings, our top RIA data and rankings, and a number of other new lists and breakdowns of the financial services industry.

We will also provide our readers direct access to leading industry authorities. Our new Ask the Experts section will provide the chance to pose a specific question to a top professional selected by the InvestmentNews staff.

We are also making it easier to get continuing-education credits on the spot in our new InvestmentNews Academy.

As always, InvestmentNews.com will be home to a wealth of resources, including Consuelo Mack’s WealthTrack, which provides video interviews with the nation’s top money managers and financial leaders. In our archives, advisers can listen to our webcasts and search our white-paper center.

In addition, there are our exclusive online columns — INPractice, OpINion Online, INRetirement, IN: TECHbits, INvestment Insights, and tax INsight. Advisers can also participate in our weekly opinion poll.

Contrary to those who think that the Internet means the death of print, the InvestmentNews team believes that each medium has unique strengths. It is our feeling that online and print complement each other.

In fact, the Internet presents us with opportunities to reach out and engage our readers in ways that we never could before.

For example, readers can comment on any story that appears on our site by simply clicking on the note in red that says, “Post a Comment.” Register to get a user name and password, and you are in.

Advisers can take part in an interactive forum on InvestmentNews.com that we call Adviser Forum. This is social networking, adviser-style.

The posted comments aren’t lost in cyberspace.

Our readers’ thoughts are very important to other advisers, and to us. Those comments help us develop story ideas and, in some cases, tip us off to unpublicized developments.

Please visit the site next week and test-drive our many online tools and features.

Our goal is to deliver news and information in the most timely and organized way possible. We can deliver on that promise only by keeping pace with your expectations.

As always, I welcome feedback, so feel free to call or send me an e-mail and let me know what you think of the new site.

Jim Pavia is the editor of InvestmentNews.

Related Topics: ING Group, Just Thinking