As we begin a new year, I am always filled with a mix of gratitude, hope, enthusiasm and curiosity reflecting on accomplishments from the prior year and am excited about what lies ahead. It seems an appropriate time to share some gratitude with you, our readers, and with the amazing team at Pensions & Investments for the incredible accomplishments we achieved in 2023 — the year we celebrated our 50th anniversary. It is our goal to inform, engage, connect and inspire our audience, so with that I'll share some highlights as well as some of the great initiatives we have planned for 2024.
Inform: In 2023, we continued to evolve our newsroom to better serve our readers and made "audience obsession" our mantra for how we deliver our reporting, including story selection, how we package stories, when we deliver you the news and how you're receiving it: newsletters, website, print or social. Our team produced more than 4,000 daily stories and charts in 2023, including nearly 1,100 stories on searches and hires, representing nearly $55.2 billion in searches and nearly $385.9 billion in hires, and continued to build our People Directory in the Research Center, which features more than 5,557 contacts.
In 2024, we'll continue to stay focused on audience obsession and you'll see us lean into coverage areas that resonate with readers, including expanded coverage of private markets, as well as the launch of a new Private Markets conference in April, focused coverage on emerging and diverse managers and a new newsletter that debuted Jan. 10 featuring the latest legal and regulatory coverage — This Week in Washington by Brian Croce, our Washington bureau chief.
Engage: In 2023, we tested new formats to engage our audience, launching Twitter Spaces interviews and LinkedIn Live interviews with leading economists and investors, reviving our Face-to-Face series that brings you deep-dive interviews with titans in the asset management and allocator realm, and creating live blogs from Milken and some of our top industry conferences to keep you abreast of up-to-the-minute news from key industry events as they unfolded.
In 2024, you'll see us continue to experiment with new formats and channels to bring you insights from thought leaders throughout the industry. We'd love to hear if there are other formats you'd like to see our team test in 2024. Podcast, anyone? Let us know your ideas!
Connect: In 2023, we created new opportunities for global asset owners to connect face-to-face and share insights and ideas. We launched the Nordics Pension Fund Tour, taking pension fund CIOs from across the globe to visit large and innovative funds in Denmark.
This new tour supplemented existing tours in the U.K. and in the Netherlands, and these all form an important component of the P&I WorldPensionSummit. Based on your feedback, I know these visits spurred incredible conversations as well as lasting friendships and collaboration.
In the U.S., we hosted our inaugural Public Funds conference along with 13 other conferences.
In 2024, we'll be evolving the conference, adding a special pension fund tour in the U.S.
And as I noted earlier, we're launching a Private Markets conference and adding some smaller roundtables for specific segments of the industry. In all, we have 15-plus events lined up to provide face-to-face connection and collaboration with key investors across the investment and retirement landscape.
Inspire: In 2023, we launched our inaugural Influential Women in Institutional Investing awards. With more than 220 nominations and 65 honorees, we had an incredibly inspiring inaugural class and produced a special report on the winners that drove our biggest single day of traffic on record. On Sept. 14, nearly 300 attendees gathered to honor these deserving women.
And, we rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange to help mark this great occasion!
In 2024, we plan to grow the program and add partnerships that will allow us to bring in more women who are early, or even pre-career, to learn from those who have achieved great success. We support continuing to build the pipeline to encourage more women to seek this industry as a career destination, and build long and rewarding careers.
Nominations for the 2024 Influential Women in Institutional Investing awards will open at the end of January. Please take the time to nominate a deserving and inspiring woman.
Once again, thank you to our loyal readers who helped us celebrate our 50th anniversary last year. We are looking forward to serving you for the next 50 years! And thank you to the P&I team for a year of incredible work and dedication.
I am so excited to see all we'll accomplish in 2024. Sending everyone wishes for health, happiness, prosperity and a continued curiosity to push ourselves and our industry forward. As always, please share your thoughts and ideas with me at [email protected].