Contact:
Janet Stites
Publisher
jstites@chinabusinessknowledge.com
China Business Knowledge (CBK) serves as a portal for information on China-based companies trading on the U.S. capital markets, including listing the companies and tracking news and research about the sector.
Why CBK? Why Now?
Publisher Janet Stites explains:
In the spring of 2008 I was asked to do public relations and recruiting work for a financial services firm with offices in mid-town New York. The company worked with Chinese-based middle-market companies helping them enter the U.S. Capital markets via OTC BB.
I knew very little about this market at the time. I had no idea so many Chinese companies were actively trading on the U.S. market and/or trying to. For a long-time journalist and information addict, it was like opening up a treasure chest. I started to dig for information and what I found was there was not much.
I had never considered doing public relations work, but the opportunity of working in a new field, of getting to tell a new story, was alluring. It reminded me of the early days of the commercialization of Web–1992-1994–before one could even “log-on” to the Internet sans an account via the government or a university. I was a freelance writer focused on technology and science, including writing feature stories for a science magazine called OMNI. We were one of the first magazines to be featured on America Online, hosting chats with our subjects and our readers. Through that writing, I was hired to be the first Editorial Director at the then nanscent Internet research firm, Jupiter Communications.
Everyday brought new visitors to Jupiter’s offices, such as David Wetherall, who came to introduce us to a tool he called BookLink which he explained was a “browser” for the Web (he later sold it to AOL) and Mark Walsh, who was then with GENIE an online service owned by GE. AOL, which still did not provide access to the Web was bragging about having 1 million users while Jim Clark was poaching Marc Andreesen from the University of Illinois to launch a company called Mosaic. Wanting to move back to publishing from research, I launched my own magazine called AlleyCat News to cover the intersection of venture capital and technology in the New York metro area.
It was an interesting time, but I don’t think I appreciated what we were witnessing. With that retrospect in mind, I could easily see the covering the sector of China-based/U.S. listed companies was a similar opportunity.
The demise of Lehman Brothers and subsequent downturn in the market, brought an end to the contract work for the Chinese financial services, but the beginning of China Business Knowledge. The advantage of having already weathered a economic downturn–a la the dot.com bust–is that you know the market will come back. It made perfect sense to me to put together an online publication aggregating information about the sector of China-based/U.S. listed companies. So, enjoy!
Janet Stites, Publisher, China Business Knowledge
Janet Stites, BIO
Stites has a 25 year history as a business, technology and science journalist. She has been a business columnist for The New York Times, was founding Publisher & Editor of PHONE+ Magazine in the late 1980′s, co-founder and CEO of AlleyCat News magazine, the first Editorial Director of Jupiter Communications in the mid-1990′s and a freelance writer. Over the years she has been a feature writer for OMNI Magazine and written for other various national publications such as Fortune Small Business, Self Magazine, and Portfolio Magazine. As well, for 15 years, she was a contributing writer for the The Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute, interviewing world-renowned scientists, such as John Holland, Murray Gell-Mann, Tom Ray, Stephen Langton and Beniot Mandelbrot.
She graduated from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications with a degree in Magazine Journalism and received her M.F.A. in fiction writing from UNC-Greensboro. She lives in New York City with her son, Sam.
(China Business Knowledge is owned by New York City-based Lede Media LLC. Material in this site is under the Copyright of Lede Media Inc./ Janet Stites 2009-2011)
