R.I.P. BNA's International Trade Reporter
Steve Charnovitz
For as long as I can remember, the best source for current international trade news as well as archival trade news, was the International Trade Reporter published by BNA, once known as the Bureau of National Affairs. At the same time, other BNA products, like the Daily Labor Reporteror the International Environment Reporter were similar intellectual gold mines for practitioners, government officials, and scholars in those fields. Often when my students sought a paper topic, I would suggest to them that a short perusal of the latest BNA publication would ineluctably lead to an idea for a paper. The flagship BNA publication was the Daily Report for Executiveswhich, 30 years ago, was regularly the first document opened up when one arrived at the office in the morning.
Sadly, BNA was acquired by Bloomberg in 2011 and the once proud BNA publications have gradually atrophied or been dismantled. In part, this development was caused by technology as paper newsletters have been replaced by less cohesive screen-based services. But there is more going on because the broad, carefully written coverage provided by BNA has not survived into the Bloomberg era. BNA was an employee-owned company and the employees seemed to see their role as communicating information about current events. From my perspective, the offerings from Bloomberg are more political and less factual. The Bloomberg website is flashy and has some good commentary, but for current news in a particular field, it lacks utility. For research purposes, I find it useless.
Over the 2018 holiday period, the BNA International Trade Reporterceased publication. There are still articles on international trade on the Bloomberg website, but they are hard to find and hard to print. At a time when international trade law and policy has expanded in importance, the poor coverage of it by Bloomberg is all the more lamentable.