Talking Biz News

Information about business
journalism from the
Carolina Business News Initiative.

Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post picks new business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio as one of the winners in the media world in 2007.

Sklar wrote, “Could it be? Is it possible that beleaguered and piled-upon Portfolio could be a….winner? After all the hoopla (read: money) leading up to its launch, expectations were high and criticism cutting, but somehow it’s still around — and so is EIC Joanne Lipman (even if some of her senior editors/contributors aren’t).

“Somehow it picked up 350,000 subscribers and seems to be a magazine with good writing (and good writers) plus a purpose: business as the intersection of everything else (in the most recent issue there are stories that touch on Will Ferrell’s online comedy site, Gossip Girl, the Drudge Report, the faux-populism of John Edwards, rock-star-cum-financier Bono’s financier-cum-rock-star partner, corporate espionage, and Wall Street family foundations (the one weak link was an essay by Robert Reich against corporate responsibility, which was simplistic and superficial).

“Also, it’s got a surprisingly vibrant web presence, with independent bloggers generating online buzz and pickup (see Lloyd Grove and Jeff Bercovici). All told, the upshot is: It’s 2008, and Portfolio is still around. Not a high bar necessarily but an important one to meet for something that may just represent the last of the great magazine launches. How it fares will cast a long shadow.”

Read more here. Another one of her winners is Rupert Murdoch.

Marketwatch media columnist Jon Friedman picks Eric Pooley’s profile of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in Time magazine as he was trying to acquire The Wall Street Journal and launch Fox Business Network as the best story of the year.

Friedman wrote, “Everyone in the media world was obsessively predicting what he might do next. Our speculation became the media’s great parlor game. For the record, lots of us are STILL fixated on this topic.

“Pooley’s biggest accomplishment was getting behind the scenes and putting his readers in the room with Murdoch.

“In retrospect, Pooley’s timing seems even more fortuitous when you recall that News Corp. was also only a few months away from yet another audacious move: the October launch of the Fox Business Network.

“FBN, in its own right, represents the most daring media start-up of 2007, edging out Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine. By executing either the Dow Jones takeover OR the FBN rollout, News Corp. would have been the dominant media story of the year.”

Read more here.

Elizabeth Connor, who became the business editor at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in October, writes Monday about some changes coming to the section.

Connor wrote, “One of my goals as business editor is to have more local stories in the section. We will be making a few other changes to the business section — in addition to the weekly profiles — to help accomplish that goal.

“Our Small Business Challenge feature will run on the first and third Tuesdays of every month. Susan Miller’s column will accompany the main story on those weeks. When there is not a Small Business Challenge story, Miller will write a column on different business concepts. She will also take your questions for an occasional Inbox column.

“The Businesses on the Move feature will continue but move to the Friday section. This weekly feature is a wrap-up of news from businesses in the area.

“These changes will mean more local news in the business section on a weekly basis while we continue to break news and cover growth and changing business trends in the Chattahoochee Valley.”

Read more here.

Steve Forbes of Forbes magazine talked with Jerry Kronenberg of The Boston Herald about a variety of topics, including the future of the business magazine.

Here is an excerpt:

Rupert Murdoch recently bought The Wall Street Journal and launched the Fox Business Network, while Conde Nast created Portfolio magazine. What’s the future for Forbes magazine in this new era?

I think traditional business (coverage) has extended enormously. We’re now big into lifestyle (coverage). We have a magazine called “Forbes Life� that we send to Forbes subscribers six times a year, and revenues on that have almost qudrupled in the last 3 years.

We also just launched a print publication called “Forbes Life Executive Woman� - the first publication aimed at women in the executive suite - and it’s off to a very good start.

So there’s a place for print (in the Web era). It’s not across-the-board anymore, but there’s a place for it as a platform.

Will there always be a printed version of Forbes magazine?

Yes. I think people like magazines. (The Web) is not the same as just picking up something that’s not mechanical.

Read more here.

Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times has his toasts and roasts to the top people in the deal-making world in 2007, and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch makes it onto both lists.

Sorkin wrote, “To Rupert Murdoch, who did the impossible, again. You bought virtually the only asset in the world that wasn’t for sale.

“And you did it without having to raise your bid. Granted, the price might never make financial sense, and you were negotiating with the gang-that-can’t-shoot-straight. But for you, the asset is priceless. Now please don’t mess it up.

“Having said that, here’s another nomination.

“Also to Rupert Murdoch. Out of politeness, I stopped myself from laughing when you made this remark while I was sitting on your couch last spring: ‘I don’t want to be in a position of putting one Bancroft against another Bancroft. I’m not in the business of stirring up trouble in the family.’

“Only you could say that with a straight face.”

Read more here.

Former managing editor Paul Steiger writes a front-page column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal where he reminisces about his career and examines the future of newspapers.

Steiger wrote, “It was the fall of 1999, and the newspaper I edited, The Wall Street Journal, was awash in money. Thanks to the dot-com boom and the lush advertising it generated, we were running the presses at full tilt nearly every day, yet had to turn away ads for lack of space.

“Even as the good times rolled, two non-newspaper names kept coming up. I recall being stunned to learn that the main place where our own readers checked stock prices was the finance section of Yahoo. A couple of kids from Stanford had launched a search engine called Google. Already, many of my colleagues were using it.

“Less than six months later, the tech bubble began to deflate. Hundreds of dot-coms died, taking with them their ad budgets. But the Web industry pushed forward, and within a few years it shredded newspaper business models that had held sway for decades.”

Read more here.

Nathan Burchfiel of The Business & Media Institute writes that some reporters covering the holiday retail sales seem to be using the words “dramatic” and “disappointing” too loosely.

Burchfiel wrote, “According to MasterCard SpendingPulse, retail sales were up 3.6 percent during the holiday season – 2.4 percent excluding gas prices. But because it’s not as big an increase as recent years have produced, the media reported it as bad news.

“On NBC ‘Nightly News,’ reporter Savannah Guthrie announced a ‘dramatic’ 2.4 percent decrease in women’s clothing sales. A decrease was ‘dramatic,’ but the same percentage increase was apparently nothing to be happy about. Guthrie called it ‘disappointing.’  

“During ‘The Early Show’ on CBS the morning of December 26, anchor Maggie Rodriguez delivered a slip up that could contribute to negative perceptions of the shopping season. She said gift cards, a popular item this year, are ‘not redeemed very often.’ However, CBS’s Seth Doane had just reported that only one in five gift cards are not redeemed, amounting to about $5 billion revenues for retailers.”

Read more here.

Bill Vlasic, who has covered the auto industry for the Detroit News and BusinessWeek, among others, has joined the New York Times as its Detroit bureau chief, according to a memo from Times business editor Larry Ingrassia posted on the Jalopnik blog.

Ingrassia wrote, “With more than a dozen years’ experience covering the industry, most recently for the Detroit News, Bill knows the business inside-out. Detroit is a company story, a consumer story, a labor story, an environmental story and a political story, and Bill has demonstrated an ability to approach the beat from all these angles.

“He won a Loeb Award in 2005 for a series on safety problems with car roofs, and was a Loeb finalist in three other years. And he wrote a gripping series on Heinz Prechter’s battle with manic depression, and how it drove the prominent auto executive to take his own life.

“His book, ‘Taken for a Ride,’ about Daimler Benz’s buyout of Chrysler, which he wrote with Brad Stertz, was lauded by our own Keith Bradsher in the Times’ Book Review. He likened it to ‘Barbarians at the Gate…a spellbinding tale, juicy gossip and all, of how business is really done among the world’s largest companies.’”

Read more here.

Motley Fool contributor Rich Duprey writes Thursday that he got a renewal notice for his Wall Street Journal subscription in the mail today that tells him he can save money if he also subscribes to the paper’s Web site.

Duprey wrote, “Yet my renewal notice told me that if I renew now I get both the print edition and the online version for the special price of $298, a savings of 47% off regular rates. By doing so, I’m ‘protected against any and all price increases.’

“What the renewal notice doesn’t discuss is what protection I have against any and all price decreases. If I renew now and Murdoch follows through on his plan to eliminate the online subscription, will he be sending me a check for the difference? Will my print subscription be extended? Will this end up being a mess?”

Later, he concludes, “While I appreciate the paper trying to protect me against ‘any and all’ price hikes, I think that when I do renew it will just be for the print version. That way, when Murdoch does make good on his promise, I need not trouble him to refund me the difference. It would just be nice if the marketing department was on the same page as the rest of the paper.”

Read more here.

TheStreet.com media critic Marek Fuchs writes Thursday that Amazon.com aims to get the business media to play along with its game by issuing a press release stating that its online sales this Christmas season were the highest ever.

Fuchs wrote, “In this holiday season, of course, online retail is growing at approximately a 20% clip, so having the best season ever on a sales basis is close to meaningless. Unless Amazon was talking about profits and … uh, it wasn’t.

“But look at how well Amazon plays the game, which is to say how well it orchestrates the game. In an industry (retail) that is struggling and earning a lot of appropriately negative headlines, Amazon’s mix of preening over how many individual items it sold and insertion of interesting facts about these items carries the day.

“This mix serves as good as dictation for the business media, which is willing to completely ignore how false a mark of accomplishment like a sales record is in a field like online retailing, which is growing by leaps and bounds, without any mention of a bottom line, the only thing that matters to investors.”

Read more here.