| As we march toward 2025, we wanted to look back at the year in Bloomberg Businessweek stories. Here are the top five, in terms of audience, that we published in 2024 (or at the very end of 2023). The list might surprise you. Plus: The latest episode of Elon, Inc. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. It's been a big year at Businessweek. We started 2024 as a weekly print magazine before, in July, moving to a monthly format. For an institution as august as Businessweek, which was founded in 1929(!), this represented a huge change. Regular digital readers, though, might be forgiven for not noticing much of a difference, as we continued to publish great journalism every day. Including these five most-read stories. Here's to another 12 months together. 1. At World Central Kitchen, José Andrés Is in the Middle of a Mess, by Sophie Alexander (December 2023) This feature, months in the making, goes deep into the celebrity chef's charity operation. It's one, for better or worse, that he's personally involved in. To wit: More than two dozen current and former employees, contractors and volunteers, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals, say Andrés frequently, if unpredictably, manages relief efforts on the ground. They say he has a fierce antipathy to bureaucracy and regularly sends his people into the thick of an urgent disaster or, if the logistics make that impossible, has them pay local restaurants to share their larders with neighbors. The chef's orders sometimes arrive when he's on the ground with a WCK response team and at other times when he's half a world away, texting directives to the team's group chat. WCK insiders call this phenomenon "Hurricane José."
This led the group to a reckoning. Read it all here. 2. What Happens When Ozempic Takes Over Your Town, by Madison Muller, Devin Leonard and Tanaz Meghjani (August 2024)  An ad on the side of the road in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Photographer: Stacy Kranitz for Bloomberg Businessweek Bowling Green, Kentucky, is many things—one of which is America's weight-loss-drug capital. What does this mean? Bowling Green can now boast of something else: It's Ozempictown, USA. Kentucky has the highest concentration of people with weight-loss drug prescriptions in the country, according to data from PurpleLab Inc., which tracks most scripts covered by insurance companies. In Bowling Green and its surrounding area, at least 4% of residents have received prescriptions to take one of these medications in the past year or so—putting it ahead of other major population centers in the state. (For comparison, prescription rates in Brooklyn, New York, and the Miami area are closer to 1%.) And these are conservative estimates. PurpleLab doesn't count people who are paying out of pocket or using copycat versions of the drugs often sold at smaller pharmacies, online telehealth operations and medical spas, which are significant and growing parts of the weight-loss drug economy, particularly in Bowling Green. The drugs' proliferation in the city is even more impressive when you consider that Kentucky's state Medicaid program doesn't cover them.
These drugs have changed life dramatically for many of its residents. Read it here. 3. Can AI Unlock Secrets of the Ancient World?, by Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet (February 2024) The degree to which AI is overhyped technology is a huge debate these days. But this is a use case that seems truly novel: reading ancient writing. One man, Nat Friedman, who developed a bit of a thing for the Roman Empire during the pandemic, decided to employ technology to peer inside the Herculaneum Scrolls: In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls' interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls' innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery. But Friedman wasn't your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he'd seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.
Read it all here. 4. Salesforce Signals the Era of Cushy Jobs Is Over, by Brody Ford and Drake Bennett (December 2023)  Illustration: Jordan Speer for Bloomberg Businessweek The scale of tech layoffs has been stunning to those in the industry over the past few years, although the impact isn't really felt so much in national jobs numbers. Businessweek writers took a long look inside one of the most emblematic big tech companies to see what was going on: Nowhere is this situation more evident than at Salesforce itself. This story is based on interviews with 40 of the company's current and former employees, including Kenny. (It's an alias; he still works there.) It's been a year since the wave of tech layoffs. Salesforce's cuts helped the company survive intense pressure from activist investors, and its stock is one of the best-performing of the year. But at this point it's possible to ask whether the changes—not only organizational ones but also cultural ones—could be permanent. The conventional wisdom among many tech executives, that you couldn't have too many salespeople, was an idea that started with Salesforce. More than any other company, it birthed the golden age of software sales. Looking at Salesforce now, it's possible to glimpse how that era might end. End of an era, folks! Read it all here. 5. The Miseducation of America's Nurse Practitioners, by Caleb Melby, Polly Mosendz and Noah Buhayar (July 2024) All year long, Businessweek has been publishing investigative stories about a trend that will be familiar to many Americans who go to the doctor: the rise of nurse practitioners as a kind of replacement for MDs. This story kicked off the series, and kept readers engaged for the better part of the year. It's a disturbing glimpse into the risks of this trend: This ongoing change also involves risks. Poorly trained NPs can pose serious dangers. In the worst cases, patients die. Dozens of nursing students and professors who talked to Bloomberg Businessweek say the problems result from the surging number of programs, which graduate thousands of NPs a year without adequately preparing some of them to care for patients. The former director of the largest NP program in the country says she can't recall denying acceptance to a single student. More than 600 US schools graduated students with advanced nursing degrees in 2022, according to US Department of Education data. That's triple the number of medical schools training physicians. More than 39,000 NPs graduated in the 2022 class, according to the AANP, up 50% from 2017. Unlike the training program for physicians, education for NPs isn't standardized. Some candidates attend in-person classes at well-regarded teaching hospitals, but a much larger number are educated entirely online, sometimes via recorded lectures that can be years old. Interaction with professors is often limited to emails and message boards. These circumstances make the required clinical portion of an NP's education even more important—but compared with doctors' residencies, those stints are brief, and students say they're of wildly variable quality. More—and part 2 of the story— is here. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment