The Business Journals offers Book of Lists
Product
Directory of ranked local companies and decision-makers, publishing original research data on the largest players in local economies.
- Currently Offered
Directory of ranked local companies and decision-makers, publishing original research data on the largest players in local economies.
Two advantages over the named alternative hold up, currency and machine-readable delivery. Crain's Chicago Business's Book of Lists is a compilation of business lists released annually, while Book of Lists' unlimited tier publishes each list as soon as it is produced and delivers the records as a CSV, so a buyer can load the same rankings into the CRM, workflow-automation and email-marketing tools it already runs instead of re-keying them.
The second is the standing base behind the data, since in 2026 the product still drew on 40 newsrooms with their own research teams, and since 2018 the group has run a 30,000-person business-advisors panel polled monthly. Distribution is equally direct, with American City earning about 90% of revenue from direct sales in March 2023, working with roughly 3,000 advertisers a month, and a self-serve platform used by more than 5,000 advertisers to process over $14 million in direct sales revenue.
Crain's Chicago Business's Book of Lists is the named direct rival for the same buyer and job, and against it Book of Lists holds the breadth position, since the rival's annual compilation collects one market's recognitions, 40 Under 40 and Chicago's Fast Fifty among them, while Book of Lists is researched across American City Business Journals' US markets for market-research, employer-outreach and prospecting buyers. In 2013 the trade counted Crain's and the Los Angeles Business Journal group as industry leaders, and American City as the sector's largest operator.
The decisive trade-off is scope and price, a single-metro annual volume against 2026 tiers running from $100 for a printed copy to $499 a year for unlimited access across 40 markets. The adjacent offering is not a rival's ranking book but American City Business Journals' own financial-data line, which serves a different buyer, financial advisers rather than market researchers, and it widened on 6 January 2026 with a private-company valuation index built on millions of historical valuations, after the publisher had acquired BizEquity in 2019.
Book of Lists grew out of a public-record section into an annual ranked-company directory that market-research, employer-outreach and prospecting teams buy, and its reach came from consolidation rather than from any change in what the rankings measure. The Top 25 lists in the Kansas City Business Journal became the Book of Lists, a hot seller and a lucrative brand, and in 1985 co-founders Mike Russell and William Worley folded eight operations, including one in Hawaii, under a single American City Business Journals umbrella.
The trade diagnosed in 2013 that the highly successful Book of Lists, alongside the rigorous schedule of special reports common to most weeklies, would have to morph onto digital platforms such as tablets and smart phones, and the sector around it was already strained, because the expansion that built 40 communities left American City carrying debt that sent its stock cratering after the 1987 market crash, after which several operations, including the Los Angeles journal, were sold off.
Book of Lists is the ranked local-company and contact directory that market-research, employer-outreach and prospecting buyers purchase to see who leads a market, and against the rival annual compilation Crain's Chicago Business publishes as its own Book of Lists, its edge is breadth of market coverage. Crain's Chicago Business gathers Chicago recognitions, while Book of Lists is researched market by market and reaches buyers in three delivery tiers.
The delivery design is what turns an annual ranking into something a research team can work with, because each tier matches a different buying habit, and in 2026 the range ran from a printed annual book at up to $100 per copy, through a $299 one-time download that is an end-of-year snapshot of the previous calendar year, to $499 a year for unlimited access where lists appear immediately on publication. The unlimited tier is the one that carries the more complete record, with more contacts and company information than print plus industry-targeted data added as each list publishes.