Why tapping a non-business journalist to edit a financial publication just might make sense.

When a 37-year-old editor, no matter how preternaturally talented, gets a job running a major media outlet, it is a sign of a generational shift. The announcement last week that Josh Tyrangiel will be the new editor of BusinessWeek as the publication completes the transition in ownership from McGraw-Hill (MHP), the company that had operated it for 70 years, to Bloomberg, the financial-information juggernaut. His appointment represents the passing of financial media from the relatively comfortable stewardship of one generation to the complicated headache of another.

Indeed, Tyrangiel’s hiring is tantamount to having his elders hand him a knotty problem and saying, “You figure it out!” Consider: Earlier in this decade, there was a group of editors at the Wall Street Journal who were eager to grab the wheel. Norman Pearlstine and John Huey, both Journal vets who eventually rose to the top at Time Inc., exemplified the path other Journal stars hoped to emulate.

Around 2004, it became apparent that the career cycle of the Journal’s editor, Paul Steiger, would not offer any of the three editors in this group the hope of succeeding to the WSJ’s helm. (And the way things played out at the Journal, they’re all probably lucky that they did.) So each of the three editors—Lawrence Ingrassia, Joanne Lipman, and Stephen Adler—had to find other venues in order to make their marks.

Ingrassia, the oldest of the three, was the first to move on. He became the business editor of the New York Times. Joanne Lipman was the last to go, to edit Condé Nast Portfolio until it folded. In between, Stephen J. Adler was recruited by McGraw-Hill to become the editor of BusinessWeek.

Like Tyrangiel, Adler was meant to preside over a dramatic transformation in BusinessWeek’s business. At the time, the enterprise rested on two pillars: the magazine and a robust conference business. Part of Adler’s mission was to add a third: the Internet.

BusinessWeek had some strengths. More newsy than the long-form, CEO-obsessed Forbes and Fortune, and more thematic (it ran the famous “The Death of Equities” cover story in 1979) than daily journalism, BusinessWeek was the queen of the magazine business for decades. With a million-reader rate base multiplied by the frequency of a weekly, it was powerful and profitable, if often overlooked. With few other outlets, business-to-business advertising made BusinessWeek the ad-page leader among all American magazines from the 1970s on.