CMC Library Ledger

Leveraging American City Business Journals

We’ve written about American City Business Journals before in our post about researching small companies, but since ACBJ has recently received a platform makeover, in this post we will cover the changes and show how you can best leverage this resource.

American City Business Journals continues to be helpful for tracking down local news coverage of small companies in specific cities, but accessing the platform has changed somewhat. You’ll first need to create your own account with your Kellogg email address. When you click the link to ACBJ from our website, you’ll be taken to a page where you can create your free membership, or click the sign in option if you’ve already created your membership account. 

By default, you’ll then be taken to the Milwaukee Business Journal landing page, which is ACBJ’s home city. To switch to a different American city, select one of the 45 cities available from the dropdown list at the top left of the page:

Once you’ve selected a city, you’ll be taken to that city’s journal. From the landing page you can browse the latest news, browse news by industry using the navigation bar at the top, or use the search feature to find news about a particular company or search by keyword. You’ll be able to further refine your search results by date, company, people, and industry, or switch your search to a different American city.

In addition to the company databases we featured in our post about building a location-driven target list of companies, you can also use American City Business Journals to identify companies within a particular city by leveraging the Book of Lists. These contain various ranked lists of all the hottest local companies within that city, such as largest public and private companies, technology startups, renewable energy companies, and many more.
Previously, the Book of Lists for each city was in an eBook image format that did not allow exporting or printing of company lists. You can still view the Book of Lists in this format by clicking on Book of Lists on the landing page, below the cover image of that week’s edition on the right side of the page:

However, with the new ACBJ platform you can now also access printable lists of companies by going to Lists and Leads on the top navigation bar:

This will take you to the Data Center for that city business journal, where you can browse the most recently released lists. Click the See All Lists button at the bottom of the page to view the full collection of lists for that city and search the lists by category to find what you need. Click into the list to view it and to access the option to print the list:

Please note that CSV download is not included in our subscription to American City Business Journals. Clicking the Print button takes you to a printable version of the page. Click the Click to Print Now button at the top to send to your printer or to save the list as a PDF:

Note: Although local business news is available for Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles through ACBJ, the Book of Lists for these cities is only available in print. Please stop by the CMC Library in person to view and make copies of lists of companies from the Book of Lists for these cities.

We hope you will find the new American City Business Journals helpful for your company search. If you need any assistance with using ACBJ or have questions, please reach out to us via chat or email us at cmclibrary@kellogg.northwestern.edu.