Business Week Online Expands Small Business Coverage, Offers Separate Website for Entrepreneurs.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 19, 1998--Business Week Online announced today that it has introduced a separate and expanded web service for owners and executives of small businesses. The Enterprise site (http://enterprise.businessweek.com) brings the traditional strength of Business Week -- in-depth analysis of news and trends - to the coverage of small companies. It also offers a wide array of interactive resources to help executives make smarter, more informed decisions, plus a library of stories from the Enterprise print edition, a special editorial section on small business that is delivered to selected Business Week subscribers, and not available on newsstands.

Unlike most other small business Web sites, Enterprise is updated daily, Monday through Friday. Among the subjects regularly covered are raising money, technology, staff and benefits, management, and personal finance tailored for the unique needs of a business owner, along with excerpts from popular business books.

"This is the first site to take small businesses seriously by covering them full-time," said Bob Arnold, editor of Business Week Online. "Small business owners rarely get the day off, so we plan to be there for them every day."

Various partners are providing Enterprise with interactive databases and services. Among them: BuyersZone, the only online comparative guide to small business products and services; Business Funding Service, which matches your company with suitable financiers based on criteria you specify; Bank Rate Monitor, the nation's premier surveyor of consumer bank rates, which now is conducting a similar survey of deposit rates and credit cards for small companies; CCH, which provides in-depth guides on the nuts and bolts of running a company; PriceScan, which helps you find the best price on consumer hardware and software; and Intershipper, a pricing guide to the best rates on overnight shipping services. All these services are free; some offer premium services that can be purchased for modest fees.

Rick Green, editorial director of the site, said Enterprise is aimed at a new sophisticated class of entrepreneurs who have a strong command of business tactics. The group includes former executives at major companies who left to start their own businesses, as well as self-starters who came up through MBA programs and chose to go it alone and other self-made entrepreneurs. "They know what to do with good information and data, but they're cut off from access to those business tools," Green said. "We're using BW's reach to put them in their hands."

Regular columns include Ask Enterprise, which gives expert answers to questions submitted by readers; Dear Diary, the wry and often hilarious chronicle of one owner's attempts to build a new business; Azriela Jaffe, who writes about resolving conflicts between work and family life; The Digital Manager, which focuses on how to manage the onslaught of technology; Economy Watch, bringing a small-business perspective to major financial events; Lender Profiles, giving inside information on how to extract money from major small-business financiers; and Entrepreneur Profiles, which looks at small business pioneers.