Talking Biz News

Information about business
journalism from the
Carolina Business News Initiative.

The International Center for Journalists is seeking applications for two one-year teaching positions at a ground-breaking Global Business Journalism Program at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, beginning Sept. 1, 2007.

Taught in English, the program will target 20-25 students each year from China and other countries. The program will train students how to cover the fast-changing world of global business, economics and finance at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. A special emphasis will be placed on comparative studies of Chinese and Western companies and financial markets.

Courses will include analyzing case studies of China’s corporations, using the Internet to develop stories, and learning the techniques of investigative reporting. The goal is to create a cadre of top-notch business reporters and editors, who can produce clear, balanced and insightful coverage of Chinese and global companies. The international founding sponsors of this project are Merrill Lynch, the Knight Foundation, Bloomberg News and Deloitte Touche.

Successful candidates will each teach two of the following courses:

* Multimedia Business Reporting

* Legal and Ethical Issues In Business Reporting - Ethics and Corporate Governance

* Business Accounting and Finance

* Hot Topics in the Global Economy

* Corporate Strategies, Case Studies of Chinese and Global Companies

* Personal Finance Reporting

An advanced degree or in-depth experience in business journalism is required. The ideal candidate will have prior experience teaching business journalism at a university and knowledge of the Chinese economy. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. Housing will be provided by Tsinghua University.

Send resume, a letter of interest and references by April 15, 2007, to: Vjollca Shtylla, International Center for Journalists, 1616 H Street NW, Third Floor, Washington DC, 20006. To apply by e-mail, send application materials to: jobs@icfj.org and indicate the position you are applying for in the e-mail subject line. Kindly indicate in your letter where you found out about this position. ICFJ is an equal opportunity employer.

Daniel Kehrer, editor of Business.com, tells Talking Biz News that the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company has been using dozens of freelance business journalists across the country to get content up for its new website venture, called Work.com, launched last October.

Currently, there are 1,565 “how-to” guides on the site. More are added daily, and there’s a counter on the home page that lists the total. That’s some 1.2 million words of original content by independent business journalists ranked and rated by popularity, as determined by total page views and reader “usefulness” rankings.

Authors have profile pages that include bios, photos, links and contact info — unless they’ve requested no contact. Anyone with expertise to share can write an article for the site. The range of articles includes broad topics such as franchising, business plans and financing, as well as niche needs on everything from workbenches and doing business in Ghana, to dealing with office romance and the latest postal rate changes. 

The ‘Leaderboard’ of most popular articles is a barometer of what small business readers are most interested in now.  Hundreds of our guides already show on on Page 1 of Yahoo search listings under popular business search terms (”business line of creditâ€? to use one example).

Says Kehrer via e-mail: “We have a small in-house editorial staff of four people (the company overall is about 100).

“Given that, but with a budget to work with, we initially created the first 1,000 articles/guides using a small army of freelance business editors and writers located throughout the United States – about 70 people altogether. It was a high-quality group that included former staffers from places like Inc., WSJ, Money and a wide range of other business and trade pubs and websites. In about four months, this army researched, wrote, edited and uploaded about 750,000 words.

“Currently we have a scaled-down version of this in place, with maybe 10 regulars and another dozen or so semi-regulars producing another 20 or so pieces weekly. And then there’s the ‘Web 2.0′ component to the site, where we get user generated content (UGC) articles from a surprisingly wide range of experts worldwide on a fascinating range of topics. There’s a range of quality to this too, but much of it has amazed us. The lesser items get low ratings and fall to the wayside.”  

Employees of Dow Jones & Co., the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and Dow Jones Newswires, in Jersey City have voted to join the union that already represents hundreds of business journalists at the company.

Among the Dow Jones operations with employees in Jersey City are Dow Jones Newsletters and Dow Jones Newswires.

An AP story stated, “The union, the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees local 1096, said if the vote count is verified by a third party, it would organize more than 200 employees, one of the largest Dow Jones employee groups not represented by the union. It could also give IAPE 1096 additional clout in ongoing contract talks with the company.

“IAPE 1096 represents more than 1,800 employees at The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Factiva and other Dow Jones properties. Some Newswires bureaus also are part of the union already.

“IAPE 1096 said it notified Dow Jones Friday morning that it has collected signed union-representation cards from a majority of union-eligible employees. An independent third party must verify the vote count, a process that could take several weeks.

“‘We’re quite certain of an overwhelming majority,’ said Tim Martell, the organizer for IAPE local 1096.

“The move comes after months of recruitment efforts at the Jersey City location. Dow Jones has said employees are better off under the current system, which gives employees benefits parallel to union-represented workers.”

Read more here.

Mike Russell and William “Doc” Worley, the founders of the Kansas City Business Journal, which was the cornerstone of what has become American City Business Journals, today the parent company of 41 weekly business newspapers, talked about how their first paper got started in an article posted Friday on the paper’s web site.

Brian Kaberline wrote, “Not everyone was pleased with the new publication. Worley can recite a quote from R. Crosby Kemper Jr., then head of United Missouri Bank: ‘The Business Journal has replaced the stockyards as the stench that permeates Kansas City.’ Russell and Worley put the quote on coffee cups — and Kemper sent someone down to get him one.

“The paper also caught the attention of The Star, itself the subject of a front-page story in the inaugural edition. Worley said he knew the paper was catching on when The Star began sending a cab to the Business Journal’s offices each week to pick up papers.

“‘We woke them up 25 years ago, and they’re still awake,’ Worley said.

“Fogel agreed that The Star rose to the challenge posed by the Business Journal and put together a strong business staff.

“Buoyed by their success, Russell and Worley began building a chain of local business journals. In four years, they started 18 papers and bought another 18.”

Read more here.

TheDeal.com executive editor Yvette Kantrow wonders on the Dealscape blog about the power behind the new Conde Nast Portfolio magazine — even though it hasn’t published its first issue yet.

Kantrow wrote, “In recent weeks, it has been cited as the impetus behind Forbes’ plan to launch a business magazine aimed at women (by the New York Post); has been credited for the possible canning of Kathy Rebello, BusinessWeek.com’s luxury-porn obsessed editor in chief (by media-gossip site Gawker.com); and has been generally hailed as the most significant and game-changing development to hit business journalism since Henry Luce dreamed up a lavishly illustrated Fortune in 1930 (by just about everyone, but most recently and most obsequiously by the American Journalism Review). Indeed, the hype has become so, well, hyperactive, that, at least according to The New York Observer, Portfolio editor in chief Joanne Lipman has placed her staff under a gag order until the magazine hits newsstands later this month. Good luck with that, Joanne.

“The genesis of the hype is obvious. Portfolio is being published by none other than Condé Nast Publications, where hype — in the form of Hollywood starlets, socialite fashionistas and the unquiet ghost of Harold Ross — roams the halls and lunches in the Frank Gehry-designed cafeteria. Portfolio has been in the works for almost two years; it’s being lavishly funded; it’s hiring aggressively; and it’s sending out the kind of slick and glossy marketing materials you’d expect from a sibling of the buzz machine known as Vanity Fair. But the expectations that are being pinned on this still-nonexistent magazine — a glossy mag, by the way, in an age that’s often declared print dead — by a sometimes adoring, sometimes catty, often envious press seem, well, a bit over the top. How can the real thing live up to the hype?”

Read more here.

Associated Press business columnist Rachel Beck goes a long way Friday in explaining why the wire service has been using numbers when writing about executive compensation that differ greatly than the “total compensation” figures reported by companies in their proxy statements.

Beck’s column isn’t written for the purpose of explaining why the numbers in AP stories are different than those in the proxies. But I’m posting parts of her column because of an earlier post from IRWebReport’s Dominic Jones, who noted the confusion being caused by the difference, and because of a conversation I heard earlier in the week between the AP business writer in Cleveland and the business editor of the Plain Dealer about the differences in the numbers.

Beck wrote, “The numbers presented are hardly the real deal.

“That’s because total pay is calculated using accounting rules that can greatly sway - and at times downplay - the true size of the pay for the nation’s corporate leaders.

“The result makes it hard to have faith in what’s being reported, especially those showing CEOs taking big pay cuts - or in some cases even negative numbers.”

Later, she added, “Instead of companies using the fair value of the stock options and awards granted to executives in the last fiscal year as the basis for the stock compensation figure on the summary table, the SEC instead directed them to use a figure that reflected the cost of options and awards that vested during the fiscal year.

“The SEC made such changes so that only options actually earned in a given year are accounted for, and that would then match the option expense being deducted from earnings. Critics, however, say the move could lower costs by spreading them out over several years, and stock grants from previous years could be included in total compensation for a given year.”

Read more here.

Forbes.com columnist Gary Weiss writes on his blog Friday that the Herbert Winokur who is helping to fund Columbia Journalism Review’s blog “The Audit” about business journalism because of his concern about the quality of the field is the same Herbert Winokur lambasted by the business media for his role in the Enron collapse as one of its board members.

Weiss wrote, “I can understand Winokur’s concern about the ‘quality’ (i.e., favorableness or lack thereof) of business reporting, considering how much of a shellacking he and the other Enron board members received.

“Many articles covering the scandal, such as this one from early 2002 in the New York Times, pointed to the role of Winokur’s finance committee in reviewing transactions by Enron’s off balance sheet partnerships.

“He and other members of the Enron board were hauled before the House Commerce Committee, and Winokur did not exactly cover itself in glory, according to Frank Rich of the Times. Pointing to an internal report on the Enron disaster, Rich said:

One author is Herbert Winokur Jr., an Enron outside director who was in the fortunate position of having a big say in a report passing judgment on his own questionable corporate citizenship. Appearing before the House Commerce Committee with condescension in his voice and a flag pin in his lapel, he contradicted himself so much under questioning that one member, Bart Stupak of Michigan, told me he had ‘impeached his own testimony.’

“Gee, I’d be concerned about the ‘quality’ of business reporting after reading stuff like this.”

Read more here.

TheDeal.com executive editor Yvette Kantrow writes that a lot of the coverage of the Blackstone Group’s initial public offering fails to understand the concept of private capital.

Kantrow wrote, “The coverage of Blackstone’s IPO plans, first broken by CNBC on Friday, March 16, demonstrates that despite all the attention lavished on private equity by the press these days, the media’s understanding of the field remains limited. For instance, the cockeyed notion that Blackstone would go public mostly to secure ‘permanent capital’ — and free itself from onerous fundraisings — seems to be lodging itself in the media’s collective brain.

“The Wall Street Journal was the first to put this idea out there. ‘By going public, Blackstone would gain a source of permanent capital, since money raised from an open market never has to be returned,’ the paper cooed on Saturday, March 17. ‘Blackstone then wouldn’t need to depend on endless rounds of time-consuming fundraising.’

“The Financial Times, in a winding Comment & Analysis piece last Wednesday, seconded this logic. For Blackstone, ‘a flotation would give it access to capital that, unlike the funds raised from private investors and pension funds, does not need to be returned to the source.’

“Permanent capital? No more fundraising? Not very likely. If a post-IPO Blackstone morphed into a publicly traded investment pool — as these reports imply it would — it would likely fall under the cumbersome regulations of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, which could, among other things, constrain Blackstone’s ability to pay fees to, or receive fees from, affiliates. This would be problematic for a firm that makes some of its money by taking a cut of the profits made by its funds when they buy and sell companies. The permanent capital argument also seems to erroneously suggest that Blackstone is looking to sell to the public an interest in an investment fund (similar to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.’s offering in Amsterdam last year) rather than in its management company.”

Read more here.

The publisher of the Fort Wayne Business Weekly newspaper, a former business reporter for the Chicago Tribune, is leaving that post to purchase another business newspaper in another state, according to a story on the Fort Wayne paper’s site.

The story stated, “Business Weekly Publisher Rob Kaiser today announced he is purchasing another business publication and will resign as publisher effective May 18.

“Jean Hoover, an advertising account executive at Business Weekly, will take over as publisher. Prior to coming to Fort Wayne, Hoover was an account executive and Midwest advertising manager at The New Yorker magazine. She also worked as Midwest advertising manager at Travel and Leisure magazine and owned her own business.

“‘I’m looking forward to being part of the continued growth and success of Business Weekly,’ she said.

“Kaiser is purchasing another business publication out of state. He could not comment on details of the transaction because it is not completed. He also could not say where the publication is located.”

Read more here. Kaiser was named editor of the paper in 2005 when it launched and became publisher a year later.

Deputy technology editor Sam Diaz of the Washington Post writes Thursday on the paper’s Post I.T. blog about the new tech podcast that the paper is starting.

Diaz wrote, “Our goal is to provide listeners with a closer look at the news and columns that you find in the Washington Post and on washingtonpost.com.

“We’re still in a ‘beta version’ while we work out some of the kinks. Today’s podcast — with yours truly as the host — features a sneak peek of Mike Musgrove’s At-Play column, which will appear in Sunday’s Business section. This week’s column looks at a concept known as ‘power leveling,’ a trend in online video games where players are pay for someone else to advance them to higher levels of the game. That’s where the real fun — greater challenges and bigger rewards — begins, players say.

“The podcast also features a segment with Rob Pegoraro, who writes the Fast Forward tech column and the Faster Forward tech blog. This week, he answers in-depth questions about what’s to like — and not like — about AppleTV, which he reviewed for today’s Fast Forward column.

“You can find our podcast at washingtonpost.com/podcast, on this blog or Rob’s Faster Forward blog.”

Read more here.