Last October, Bloomberg Chief Content Officer Norm Pearlstine told our Future of Business Media conference that the company was willing to look at acquisitions but, in the immediate future, wouldn’t be making “the major kind of acquisition that gets written about.” No, that took a year and it’s one that we’ll still be writing about next October. Pearlstine spoke with paidContent soon after the announcement that Bloomberg L.P. is acquiring BusinessWeek and that he will be the magazine company’s chairman once the deal closes. Pearlstine covered a lot of the “why”—why did Bloomberg shift gears about buying the weekly, why not to expect mass layoffs, and more but the “how” is going to take longer. Some plans are in place already, like expanding the number of editorial pages and committing to “true” weekly frequency. Much of it will take the kind of deep dive that buyers don’t get during due diligence.

Changing minds: Bloomberg shifted course during the BW sales process, sliding from “maybe” to “no” to a last-minute bid. What happened to change minds?

Pearlstine: “I think like others we took an initial look at it and it took us a while to figure out what the opportunities were and to get excited about it. The initial observation was that it was a publication struggling financially in a narrow category lumped together with Fortune and Forbes that were also struggling. The more we thought about it, the more we looked into it, the more we saw the opportunity to invest in a weekly magazine about global business—and that in doing so we could differentiate ourselves from what is typically thought of as competition for Bloomberg.” By combining the two, they decided, we can “create a unique and powerful brand that can do a lot of good things for us strategically—and over time will reward the investment that we put into it.”

All about editorial: But that doesn’t change the financial realities. How will Bloomberg break out of the financial struggle when McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) couldn’t and Forbes and Fortune haven’t been able to? For Pearlstine, who was managing editor and executive editor of the Wall Street Journal and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., it all centers on editorial. “Every magazine begins with editorial and what we bring together ... is a very talented editorial staff at BusinessWeek and at Bloomberg, 2,200 editorial employees in 146 bureaus in 72 countries. That distinguishes us from anybody else who’s going to be putting out a magazine. We have the resources to provide depth and breadth of coverage that will result in an extraordinary magazine. I have no doubt about it.” When I asked later what one quality he brings from his tenure at Time Inc. that will help him as chairman of BusinessWeek, Pearlstine said, “a gut appreciation of the editorial talent” at BW and Bloomberg.  (Before joining Bloomberg, Pearlstine was senior advisor to The Carlyle Group’s telecommunications and media group in New York.)

Digital opportunities: After duplication, says Pearlstine, on a comScore basis, it’s about 7.8 million uniques with “very little overlap between the two.” He describes the potential as “extraordinary and exciting.” But Bloomberg has yet to decide how Bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek.com will work together online: “You have to do a lot more work before you make that decision. The beauty of the internet is it doesn’t necessarily have to be either-or.”

Offline, the business side of the website will report to former Yahoo exec Kevin Krim, who joined Bloomberg earlier this year; he reports to Andy Lack, head of Bloomberg Multimedia. “We’ve been doing just a ton of work to revamp our own multimedia efforts be it website or television and we think the BusinessWeek online and mobile efforts are a very good fit for us. The exact strategy of how we do it, it’s just too soon to say.”

Expanding reach: “How it expands our reach is pretty obvious. BusinessWeek has a paid circ of 936,000, it reaches, according to the MRI numbers, 4.8 million readers around the world in its English language edition ... Bloomberg primarily accesses an audience of 300,000 extremely influential subscribers to the Bloomberg terminal but we have always had both a desire and a need to be read in the corporate suite, in areas of government where people are not subscribing to the terminal and that access is important to us in terms of our ability to break news, to provide better coverage for the subscribers of the terminal and BusinessWeek delivers on all of that.”

Investing: Is Bloomberg ready to invest in BusinessWeek as well as acquire it? No hesitation from Pearlstine: “For sure. We will expand the number of pages devoted to editorial, we will commit to being a true weekly because we think that even in this market the predictability that comes with a weekly has value. I think that’s what distinguishes The Economist and The Week from the fortnightlies, from weeklies that cut back on their frequency.

Staffing: Pearlstine dismissed pre-sale speculation that Bloomberg would gut BW‘s editorial staff. “The quick answer is that, first of all, we bought BusinessWeek to invest in it. Secondly, we do not have the experience or skill sets here to produce a consumer weekly. That is not what we do here and that means we’re going to have to rely on an awful lot of people from BusinessWeek. The third thing is that, in the due diligence process, we’ve had limited access to the people who worked at BusinessWeek. We met with senior management a couple of times and I had four half-hour conversations with some top editors but we have a great deal of work to do over the next several weeks to get to know every BusinessWeek employee and to come to an understanding of the business. There’s just no way coming in, signing an agreement that any responsible person ought to be making judgments about size of staff, amount of severance and so forth.”

That shouldn’t be read as a sign that the staff will be left intact either. “It’s no secret that the magazine has been struggling financially and ultimately you have to do what’s good for the business but we expect we’re going to have to be investing and building and that’s going to require a lot of people.”

• BusinessWeek’s Sale To Bloomberg: A History In Links