Q&A

Our team recently sat down with Emma Rosenblum to discuss her top priorities and responsibilities as Editor in Chief of Bloomberg Pursuits, as well as the newest trends emerging in the luxury and lifestyle industry.

As the editor of Bloomberg Pursuits, what are some of your key priorities?
As the leader of Bloomberg’s luxury channel, my top priority is and will always be to delight, surprise, and educate our readers across all platforms. We have our digital channel, which produces about five articles daily, a bimonthly Bloomberg TV show that highlights our most visually stunning stories, and a ten page weekly section in the newly redesigned Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. So we’re reaching our audience in many different ways. This year, I’d love to grow that reach–through traffic to the channel, viewers to the show, and also by helping to attract new subscribers to Businessweek.

What is the primary goal of Bloomberg Pursuits?
Our audience is driven, smart, and generally interested in the “best” stuff. They want to know what to buy, what to wear, and where to travel and eat, among other things. But they don’t necessarily have time to research it themselves. The goal of Bloomberg Pursuits is to give them all those answers.

The resources of Bloomberg Media and News is the wind at our backs, meaning we have reporters all over the globe doing research for us about the best of the best in travel, food, fashion, and lifestyle topics. We bring a credibility to our recommendations and a rigor to our reporting, both digitally and in print, that you won’t find anywhere else in the luxury media world.

Last year, Bloomberg Pursuits unveiled its redesigned luxury channel on Bloomberg.com. What did the redesign entail?
The design of the channel was simplified and made more upscale, and we expanded our amazing original photography and gave our stories more room to breathe. Our article formats are also new and improved, and we’ve made it easier to see and find all of our great stories. We updated the fonts we used and also added separate pages for every topic we cover.

What is your editorial vision for the digital channel? 
We have a team of super talented writers coming up with ideas for stories daily on trends in food, style, automobiles, art and culture, and travel—really anything that affects our readers’ lives outside of work. A story gets the go-ahead if it’s adding something to the conversation, and we don’t regurgitate others’ news.

After looking at our channel–or reading the Pursuits section in Businessweek–readers should feel more cultured and educated, and also amused and inspired.

How has the Bloomberg Pursuits brand evolved since you became editor in 2015?
Though Pursuits has evolved a lot, we’ve always had the driving ethos of “intelligent luxury.” When I first started, Pursuits was solely a magazine for Bloomberg terminal subscribers. Since then, it’s morphed into what it is today—a forward-facing, cross-platform luxury channel. We now have a robust team of writers and editors, which is reflected in our greater reach and influence. It’s been great to have more people interact with Pursuits, and to get feedback from readers on the terminal and also from the web. 

Prior to joining Bloomberg, you worked at Glamour magazine, first as articles editor and then senior editor. What about Bloomberg inspired the move?
I loved working at Glamour and truly enjoyed editing and writing stories for women. Bloomberg presented an entirely different challenge—how to create smart, relevant lifestyle stories for a business audience. It was fun to take that on and to first redesign the ETC section, which at that time was the back section of Businessweek, and then move on to Pursuits.

What is the newest trend you see emerging in the luxury travel industry?
Our amazing travel editor Nikki Ekstein is the right person to answer this—she’s knows everything about the industry! Something we’re seeing a lot of is a focus on traveling for “good,” as well as hotel brands getting into sustainability. Many travel companies are working with surrounding communities to build and maintain their properties, and consumers are keen to see more of that. For example, we just ran an article by Nikki in the Pursuits section of Businessweek about a luxury resort in Thailand, Anantara Golden Triangle, that’s a haven for mistreated elephants. It’s a great, uplifting story.

– Gabriela Tama