Businessweek

Over and over, magazines and newspapers miss the truth about business by a mile. They're so consistently bad, in fact, that the media has been a leading contrary indicator of stock prices and business trends. Here are seven classic examples.

It's one of the dirtiest little secrets about mandatory student health insurance and the rise of college-sponsored health care plans: for all those dollars in hefty premiums the plans take in from students, they spend comparative peanuts paying out students for benefits -- sometimes as little as 30...

The 80-year-old Businessweek, now Bloomberg Businessweek, has an all-new design intended to pack a lot more information into each page, says editor Josh Tyrangiel. Just about every story is preceded by bullet points that tease its main findings, then tagged by a summary.

As a quick search of the Web will show, the very concept of "internships'' has become an industry in and of itself. A wide range of resources are devoted to listing, discussing, describing and ranking internships and even, as I've mentioned before, selling internships. There's no doubt that part...

Business Week ranked Portland, Ore. the unhappiest city in the U.S. due to the number of suicides, sales of antidepressants, high unemployment (still in the double digits) and 222 cloudy days. Likewise, MainStreet.com ranked Oregon dead last in its Happiness Index (although I'm suspicious because...

The textbook and nonfiction publisher -- which is behind the For Dummies how-to series -- reported healthy results for the third quarter, thanks to the education division and currency gains.

The other shoe is about to drop at BusinessWeek. Shortly after taking over the magazine, news giant Bloomberg pruned its staff by a reported 30% and made it known that more downsizing would come sometime before May. Sources say that round will begin Thursday.

BusinessWeek looks at 10 markets in California where housing demand has picked up of late, boosting prices off the lows we've seen in the past few months.One of the reasons demand has picked back up is California's $10,000 tax credit for buyers, on top of the $8,000 federal first time buyer credit....

House and Garden. Blueprint. Domino. Country Home. These magazine titles shuttered in the last 15 months could be the first in a long string of failures, if this quarter's ad page reports are any indication (the number of ad pages is widely referred to in the industry as a sign of the profitability...

While 2008 may well go down in history as the start of the current recession, it looks like 2009 may be the year of the four day work week. Many companies, struggling to stay afloat, are turning to a compressed four day work week. By cutting everyone back, companies are able to cope with reduced...