Fierce readies a new weekly report on the European biotech scene

Over the years FierceBiotech and our growing group of daily and weekly publications on the life sciences have gathered together more than 200,000 subscribers from around the world. Obviously, we're pretty heavily concentrated in the U.S., but our European and Asian audiences have been growing right alongside the North American group.

A recent breakdown on FierceBiotech's online traffic--with about 1 million web visits a month now--found 72% of you in the U.S. and Canada, 16% in Europe and 10% in Asia. Two financial centers, in New York and London, are our two biggest hot spots for daily web traffic. And we've made a point of thinking globally about our coverage for some time now, reporting on the news and trends playing out in the industry around the world.

Some years ago I began to make regular trips to Europe in an ongoing campaign to get to know more of you on a face-to-face basis. As I've mentioned before to various audiences, an experimental drug in France or the U.K. or Sweden, etc., has the same intrinsic value as one in Boston or San Francisco. But those assets and the biotech companies at work on them don't get anything like the attention U.S. media groups provide homegrown programs. That absence of coverage has made it harder to complete collaborations--at least at the right valuation--raise funds and recruit new talent. And no media group operating behind a paywall only the few can afford can substitute for a readily available online portfolio of stories that can be Googled 24/7 or found on our websites.

We live in a world where the Google resume is influencing careers and company prospects. And that's the stage on which we play at Fierce.

So now we're going to take our global strategy one step further.

In order to make sure we're devoting the kind of attention the rest of the world deserves, we're launching a weekly EuroBiotech Report, a regional news roundup done Fierce-style, on Friday. Later, we're going to follow up with an Asian biotech report. We'll still provide a global look at the daily news regarding the global industry, turning to the Friday edition of EuroBiotech to go deeper into the companies and products in development, and the biotech trends that affect all our lives.

I'm happy to report that the CRO Catalent has stepped in as our inaugural sponsor of the European report, which will hit early on Fridays. Rather than separate it from the daily, we'll be running the new report in our Friday edition of FierceBiotech, with the first one coming up at the end of this week.

As I've found out from firsthand experience, the European industry has an avid interest in what happens in the U.S. and Asia. And I believe our U.S. and Asian audience also has a lot to learn about what's happening in Europe.

If you've got any suggestions or news for us, please send it along to me. I'm doing the first report this week and then handing it over to Nick Paul Taylor, our European correspondent based in the U.K., who's been covering the biotech industry for years now. -- John Carroll, editor-in-chief (email | Twitter)