In a refreshingly candid exchange with the Boston Social Media Club on Monday night, bestselling author and former BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker (Twitter: @stevebaker) admitted to an ulterior motive when he co-wrote a cover story on blogs in 2005 for BusinessWeek.

Baker, author of the The Numerati and the keynote speaker at this years Enzee Universe User Conference in Boston, spoke with members of the Boston Social Media Club after his Enzee presentation at an event sponsored by Netezza at the Westin Waterfront Hotel.

Update: You can listen to the audio of Stephen Baker’s entire conversation with the Boston Social Media Club over at Todd Van Hoosear’s blog, ItsFreshedGround.com. Many Tech PR Gems readers recall that Todd launched TechPRGems way back in 2004, and honed his social media skills at Topaz Partners, along with a disproportionate number of other cutting-edge social media pioneers. Thank you Todd!

Baker co-wrote a prescient BusinessWeek cover story with Heather Green in 2005 about blogs, a topic he said had finally caught the attention of a BusinessWeek editor during the 2004 presidential campaign as a “force to be reckoned with.”

Sensing an uncertain future at BusinessWeek, Baker decided (in advance) to use the cover story as a vehicle to promote his first BusinessWeek blog, BlogSpotting. He envisioned the blog as “a little row boat that will allow us to float away when BusinessWeek sinks.”

Sure enough, Blogspotting had its highest traffic on its launch day, Baker said.

Baker credits the cover story for introducing him to the world of social media, “and that’s where the future was,” he said.

Ultimately Baker left BusinessWeek on his own terms last year, but he’s convinced that he would have been fired if he had stayed — along with many talented BusinessWeek reporters and editors who lost their jobs.

In a twist of fate, Baker’s blog beat at BusinessWeek beat provided him with the predictive powers that good data enables — and an early sense of print media’s impending doom.

“The two things I was covering in 2005 were social media and analytics,” he said. “If you think what killed Businessweek it was all the new media and all the choices that advertisers and readers had, and the power of Google to analyze data, target advertising, and beat the pants off of traditional media in that business. I feel like I covered the two industries that killed my job.”

Watch Stephen Baker at the Boston Social Media Club in this excerpt on YouTube.

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