Talking Biz News

Information about business
journalism from the
Carolina Business News Initiative.

CareerJournal, The Wall Street Journal’s web site about work-related news and advice, relaunched on Thursday with new content and a design that makes it look part of The Journal.

The paper had hired Jennifer Merritt, a former BusinessWeek and Money editor and also former business editor of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, last year to make the site more robust and more newsy.

CareerJournal.com used to be a rehash of stuff in The Journal, packaged with three or four CareerJournal reporter-written stories a month. Now, it’s new stuff almost every day from a dedicated reporter and freelancers, including former BusinessWeek writer Toddi Gunter, and the business journalists who write career- and management-related columns for the paper.

“This new channel gives users access to not only the existing popular content and features they’ve come to expect from CareerJournal.com, but also a more robust, seamless WSJ.com experience,” said Alan Murray, executive editor of The Journal Online.

For the past two years TheLadders.com, a premium online job search service catering exclusively to the $100k+ career marketplace, has partnered with CareerJournal to offer their services to job seekers. TheLadders.com serves as the launch sponsor of the enhanced CareerJournal at WSJ.com.

The new section will feature:

• 90 Days: A look at situations people face in their careers and what’s needed in the first 90 days to succeed. Upcoming topics include working abroad, getting a new boss and being laid off;

• How I Got Here: Profiles of real people describing in their own words the lessons learned, turning point and eureka moment of their careers;

• Videos featuring comments and interviews with recruiters, career coaches, executives and more, and podcasts addressing reader questions and career trends.

Business and financial news Web sites Marketwatch and Minyanville have struck an agreement to share content, according to a release.

Links to all Minyanville articles mentioning specific public companies will now appear in news results on MarketWatch.com’s stock quote pages. Concurrently, Minyanville users can now access MarketWatch stock quote pages directly from the Minyanville home page, which will also feature several of MarketWatch’s top news headlines.

“Minyanville’s audience of traders and our users both value in-depth news and analysis about the companies they follow, so we’re excited to make our articles, columns and stock news more easily accessible to Minyanville readers,” said Jim Bernard, general manager of MarketWatch.com, in a statement. “With the economy and stock market dominating headlines, Minyanville articles will be a great complement to our columns and products like ‘First Take’ that put financial news in perspective.”

“The decision to partner with MarketWatch.com on our syndicated content is another milestone in our mission of bringing financial news and information that’s educational, yet entertaining, to as many people as possible,” said Todd Harrison, founder and CEO of Minyanville, in a statement. “At the same time, visitors to Minyanville.com have been asking for direct access to the latest stock news, and nobody does that better than MarketWatch.”

Read more here.

The best business blogs have a voice, a focus on a topic and are frequently updated, said Jamie Hammond, editor in chief of AOL Money & Finance.

“You’ve got to mix it up,” said Hammond. “You’ve got to have a voice that brings people in to participate.”

Hammond was speaking Thursday via videoconference to a group at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which is holding a series of weekly conversations called “Inside the Future of News” with online newsrooms.

Hammond said that AOL’s Money & Finance team has two editors who oversee a group of about 100 bloggers and editors that are contractors. Some of them are paid by post, while others are paid by the hour. “The vast majority are not doing it for the money,” said Hammond. “They are doing it for the exposure.”

AOL Money & Finance runs the Bloggingstocks.com blog, which recently had 2 million unique users in one month, said Hammond. It launched Walletpop.com, a consumer finance blog, in December. That blog had more unique visitors than Bloggingstocks.com in its first month, he added.

Another one of the group’s top blogs is Bloggingbuyouts.com, which covers private equity and has been around for about a year.

Hammond said that the bloggers work in tandem with the news staff. Sometimes, a blog post will be inserted into a spot on the AOL page that a news story would ordinarily fill. And sometimes, editors suggest to bloggers that the expand on a business news item.

But Hammond said there is still a future for strong reporting in covering business. “There’s still going to be a need for great reporters,” he said. “That’s very important.”

Mike Huckman, who covers drug companies for CNBC, writes Thursday that Bristol-Myers Squibb changed its earnings release after a number of media outlets reported that they missed analyst expectations.

Huckman wrote, “Here’s an excerpt from the very top of the press release BMY issued just after 7:36:59 ET this morning on the PR Newswire:

“Posts Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2007 Non-GAAP EPS of $0.33 and $1.38 from Continuing Operations ($0.35 and $1.48, including Discontinued Operations), Exceeding Top End of Non-GAAP Guidance Range”

“(GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.)

“As a result, several news outlets including CNBC, Dow Jones, Associated Press and MarketWatch reported that BMY missed the 34-cent consensus by one cent.

“Curiously, when I just went to the Bristol-Myers Squibb web site to take another look at the press release, at first the page came up as ‘inactive.’ Okay, that could be some kind of computer snafu. Then a few seconds later the press release was back up, but guess what? The line that led to the widespread ‘confusion’ is gone! Disappeared. You can check it out for yourself.“

Read more here.  Anybody else had a company change its earnings release after it was already released?

Joseph Weisenthal of PaidContent.org writes Thursday that former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz believes that the business media will soon face the same issues plaguing consumer media.

Crovitz was speaking at the Software and Information Industry Association Summit in New York.

Weisenthal wrote, “Crovitz contends that it’s only a matter of time before the disruptive forces affecting consumer media will affect the business side. Eventually, he argued, consumers of business news and information will demand the same ease of use and availability that they get from consumer media. As a canary-in-the-coal-mine example, he cited Yahoo Finance, which is used by a lot of business professionals, despite the fact that they all have access to more professional tools at work.

“Hybrid model: Although Crovitz does not have to face shareholders anymore, he’s still an ardent defender of the WSJ’s hybrid model. ‘I think the hybrid model works very well… it is unfortunate that other have abandoned the paid model… Deeply engaged users are highly valued by advertisers.’ He noted that there are now as many paying subscribers to the online edition of the WSJ as there are paying readers of the print NYT: ‘Brands and content that people pay for will have a better chance of thriving than brands that people do not value enough to pay for.’ He denied that the hybrid model is confusing to users, suggesting its more confusing to analysts that don’t have access to all of the internal data.”

Read more here. 

Richard Tofel, a former Wall Street Journal assistant managing editor and Dow Jones & Co. vice president, writes Thursday in the New York Sun that a proposed settlement of a lawsuit regarding News Corp.’s acquisition of Dow Jones leaves him baffled.

The settlement would pay lawyers nearly $1 million, but give shareholders nothing.

Tofel wrote, “Dow Jones declined to explain why it accepted the $895,000 in fees. Had they balked, the closing of the acquisition might have been delayed by the litigation, perhaps for months. So the tradeoff of settling a pesky lawsuit for less than a million dollars to speed closure of a $5 billion deal could well have seemed an attractive conclusion to a familiar game.

“And it is familiar. We know this situation — a ’settlement’ on behalf of all shareholders that yields them little, and their lawyers a lot — isn’t unusual. But that doesn’t mean it’s in the public interest. It’s not.

“Of course, the attorneys’ fees in this case need to be approved by a justice of the New York State Supreme Court. Our letter is being delivered within the deadline for filing formal objections, although we are acting solely as journalists here. Maybe this case would be a good place to start bringing some reason to this arena.”

Read more here.

Reuters reporter Jennifer Coogan writes that CNBC business journalist Charles Gasparino send the stock market tumbling late Wednesday with his comment about the likelihood of bond insurers Ambac and MBIA being downgraded.

Coogan wrote, “On Wednesday, the three major U.S. benchmark indexes had each been up by more than 1 percent after the Federal Reserve cut the fed funds rate by a half percentage point at 2:15 p.m.

“Then, shares of Ambac and MBI tumbled abruptly at around 3:10 p.m. when CNBC On-Air-Editor Charles Gasparino made his comments about the companies. Major indexes quickly followed suit.

“‘My gut is telling me Moody’s and S&P are going to downgrade either one or both,’ Gasparino said on air. CNBC later posted a report on its Web site saying the network had learned that the downgrade could come as early as Wednesday. The report cited no sources for the information.

“Traders attributed the market’s about face to the Gasparino report, noting the S&P 500 slid rapidly from its session high, reached at about 3:08 p.m.”

Read more here.

Carolyn Murphy of TheDeal.com wrote Wednesday that the sale of the Financial Times edition in Germany shows that Pearson plc is retreating from an eight-year attempt to be the dominant German financial daily to concentrate on what it sees as a more attainable goal — boosting the FT brand worldwide and improving its digital financial information business.

Murphy wrote, “It seems some consumer research returned the result that nonreaders and younger managers perceived the FT as inaccessible and old-fashioned, the company said.

“So, in April, the company launched a new ad campaign aimed at ‘capturing the energy and excitement of modern business,’ as well as a direct marketing campaign. At the same time, the FT unveiled a facelift, with plans to add more color pages and execute design and content changes to its magazines. The company also hired some new editorial blood. The next month, the FT launched a sponsored magazine focused on the business of sports and premiered with America’s Cup and Formula One racing. It was the first launch by the FT’s then-new strategic development unit.

“On the Web front, Pearson in October came down on both sides of a strategy many media companies have experimented with: paid content. The company unveiled plans to open up FT’s online content for free, sort of, with a ‘light touch’ registration fee for readers who want access to more than 30 articles per month.”

Read more here.

Michael Learmonth of Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Fox Business Network head Kevin Magee believes that the network can go ahead and use Wall Street Journal reporters on its shows despite the newspaper’s agreement with rival CNBC.

Learmonth wrote, “Magee, speaking at the Always On conference yesterday, didn’t go into details about FBN’s plans to use WSJ staff. But he did lay out his case: ‘There are some restrictions. We can’t just go ahead and use anything. I believe the restrictions involve regularly-scheduled, branded segments. There is a carve-out for non-business news and there is a carve-out for breaking news.’

“How does Magee know? He was working at CNBC when the deal was struck. ‘The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones has an existing contract with CNBC that actually got started while I was there; I was part of the team that helped integrate it,’ he said.

“Fox News is already making liberal use of some of the WSJ’s most prominent writers, including columnist Peggy Noonan and Washington bureau chief Jerry Seib during Fox’s SOTU coverage.”

Read more here.

Fortune|Money Group president Vivek Shah announced Wednesday that Kirk McDonald will become chief revenue officer for the business magazines, effective March 3.

McDonald was previously the senior vice president of sales, marketing and client service for DRIVEpm and Atlas Enterprise, both key units of Microsoft’s advertising business.

Reporting to Shah, McDonald will oversee the Fortune|Money Group’s worldwide advertising sales and marketing divisions and will be accountable for all print and digital advertising revenue.

“Kirk is a seasoned multi-media veteran with deep experience across a range of media brands. He is a skilled business leader with a proven expertise running a business unit, negotiating commercial partnerships, developing sales teams, and delivering positive business results,” said Shah in a statement. “We know he will be a valuable addition to our team.”

McDonald has a 16-year track record in advertising sales and business development, where he previously oversaw both business units’ client sales process, client interactions, and was instrumental in shaping the joint business’ strategy and direction at DRIVEpm and Atlas Enterprise.

Prior to his role at Microsoft, McDonald spent nine years in senior leadership positions with CNET Networks Inc. Before that, McDonald spent eight years in the magazine industry, including Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. and Conde Nast’s Self magazine.

McDonald has his work cut out for him. As Talking Biz News reported earlier this month, Fortune saw a 10.5 percent decline in ad revenue in 2007, and Fortune Small Business reported a 16.8 percent decline.