Fleeting popularity

When the CFOs attending the Association of Bioscience Financial Officers annual meeting in San Francisco assembled to hear representatives of the national media last week, the message was - in a word - a bummer. The correspondents from Business Week, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times all related versions of the same message: Vanishing space for biotech stories, fewer reporters covering the industry and dwindling interest on the part of their editors.

BioCentury, represented by its publisher, hewed to its party line: Worry about building sustainable businesses, or creating real asset values, not the volume of clips necessary to stroke the CEO's ego...