The creator of InvestmentNews has left the building
When Bill Bisson called me into his office the week before last to say he was retiring after 34 years with the company, I said: “Good for you; bad for us.”
When Bill Bisson called me into his office the week before last to say he was retiring after 34 years with the company, I said: “Good for you; bad for us.”
His name appears at the top of this newspaper’s masthead, which is fitting because InvestmentNews is essentially his brainchild.
As they say in Hollywood, let me tell you the back story of the creation of InvestmentNews and Bill’s role in shaping its success.
On a trip to London in the early 1990s, Rance Crain, the president and editorial director of Crain Communications Inc., the parent company of InvestmentNews, read a weekly business newspaper called Money Marketing, a British publication aimed at financial advisers.
He thought it was a great concept for a U.S. newspaper, so he brought back a copy of the publication to show Bill, who at that time was the publisher of Crain’s flagship financial publication, Pensions & Investments.
Bill was already aware of the growing investment advisory market and had been keeping a close eye on the magazines Financial Planning and Investment Advisor.
He and his P&I colleagues, Mike Clowes and Nancy Webman, had been having background discussions with folks in the financial services industry who were studying baby boomers and trends in the growth of the investment business.
For his part, Bill kept the research going. By 1995, all signs pointed to a robust advertising and readership market for a high-frequency publication in the financial advisory space.
With Bill as publisher and Mike running the editorial side, InvestmentNews was launched in 1997 as a newspaper for investment advisers.
“Bill has been a great advocate of editorial quality and integrity of the publications for which he has been responsible,” said Mike, who retired in 2006 as the editorial director of InvestmentNews and Pensions & Investments. “Bill always protected reporters and editors from those who might try to improperly influence editorial coverage.”
During my six years as editor, I can attest to the fact that when someone challenged the fairness of a news story in InvestmentNews, Bill was the first to check with me to make sure that we dotted every i and crossed every t.
He also demanded integrity and fairness from editors and always placed the readers’ interests first.
While old-fashioned in that sense, Bill was an innovator in every other way. He constantly prodded the editorial and business sides of his publications to reinvent themselves and to be slightly ahead of the curve.
“He has never been satisfied with his publications, despite their success,” Mike said. “He was always asking: “What can be improved?’ “What can we do better for our readers?’”
Suzanne Siracuse, the InvestmentNews publisher, agrees.
“Bill laid the groundwork early on in establishing that the reader always comes first,” she said. “This simple mantra goes into every story we write and in every product we launch. We plan on continuing to use that as a gauge as we expand into other areas that are important to our readers.”
As a business leader, Bill not only has been exceptionally smart — after all, he hired me — he also had a great sense of where the businesses of institutional and retail investing were headed. To paraphrase hockey great Wayne Gretzky, Bill didn’t just play where the puck was; he played where the puck was going to be.
Above all, what mattered most to Bill was that InvestmentNews delivered the best possible material to its readers each week, providing them with the information and insight they needed to help their business prosper.
It will be strange on Friday when Bill closes his office door for the last time. I wish him a very long, healthy and happy retirement and want him to know that his legacy lives on.
Jim Pavia is the editor of InvestmentNews.
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