Talking Biz News

Information about business
journalism from the
Carolina Business News Initiative.

Sophie Morris of The Independent in London interviews Merryn Somerset Webb, the editor of MoneyWeek, the best-selling business magazine in England, about her career. Webb also writes a column for the Financial Times.

Here is an excerpt:

What is the best thing about your job?

The variety. The magazine covers everything, because there is almost nothing that isn’t affected by the economy or that affects the economy. I can talk to anybody about anything and I have lunch with all sorts of fascinating people. It’s an amazing time to be a financial journalist. While predicting the credit crunch and global recession was relatively easy because it was so obvious, I have no idea what happens next. It’s new economic territory.

And the worst?

Deadlines. As soon as you finish one issue, there’s another one to start on.

How do you feel you influence the media?

As a magazine we have been really ahead of the game in looking at the things that have happened this year. We picked up on a lot of the big themes in global finance very early, from the bubble in commodities to the one in housing.

Read more here.

Chris Ariens of TVNewser reports Sunday that both business networks, CNBC and the Fox Business Network, will be live on Labor Day due to Hurricane Gustav even though the markets are closed.

Ariens writes, “CNBC will be live tomorrow with international programs at 4amET and will begin U.S. coverage at 7am running until 6pmET and is calling its coverage, ‘America’s Oil Crisis: Hurricane Gustav.’ CNBC’s Scott Cohn and Mary Thompson report live on the ground, where preparations are underway ahead of the storm.

“Fox Business will be live from 5am-7pmET, or later if need be. Alexis Glick is in New Orleans and correspondent Jeff Flock, who spent years reporting on hurricanes with CNN, will be near landfall in Louisiana. Neil Cavuto remains at the RNC with heavy Gustav coverage.”

Read more here.

Felix Salmon of Conde Nast Portfolio writes Sunday that the column by Ben Stein in the New York Times shows that the paper’s business section needs a counter column written by a Democrat.

Salmon writes, “Putting the substance of the column aside for one minute, I’ll concede at the outset that this is an explicitly partisan column from an unabashedly Republican pundit. I did hear, once, second-hand, that NYT business editor Larry Ingrassia, when questioned, defends the inclusion of Ben Stein in his paper specifically because he’s a Republican who somehow ‘balances out’ the more left-leaning tendencies of fellow Sunday columnist Gretchen Morgenson.

“But Morgenson is no party-political hack, and indeed has shown far more sense during the present economic crisis than the crazed populist rantings of Stein. She doesn’t accuse Goldman Sachs of deliberately trying to profit by bringing down the US economy; instead, she’s much more likely to file a boring-but-important reported story like her column this week on municipal bond disclosures.

“As political thermometer ratchets up between now and November, I’m sure we’ll see many columns about Obama’s economic policy written by Republicans. This one is probably a reasonably good expectation of what to expect: there will be better, and there will be worse. But it’s quite clearly a column that only a Republican could ever write. If the NYT business section really thinks that it’s a natural home to such animals, it should really start running similar columns from Democrats too. I’m sure Brad DeLong would be happy to oblige.”

Read more here.

Connie Coyne, the reader advocate for the Salt Lake Tribune, writes Saturday about how readers are upset with the paper’s decision to cut its printed stock listings.

After complaints, the paper did begin printing precious metal quotes again.

Coyne writes, “Many of you have expressed dismay that we eliminated what amounts to about a page of agate type that contained the stock information from the previous day’s trading.

“One reader expressed the opinions of many readers in this e-mail:

“‘I am very disappointed with your decision to only list a very limited list of daily stock quotes. In an effort to save money, I have been trying to get my wife to cancel the paper for quite some time. She has resisted so far, but this is the final straw. The only portion I read regularly is the stock quote. If there are plans to consider reinstating the stock page in its entirety, I would certainly like to know about it. Otherwise, I will not be renewing my subscription.’

“We will be sorry to lose you as a subscriber if you follow through on that.

“The Tribune was one of the last daily newspapers to eliminate the large stock market listings. We did it only after determining that stock market information is available a number of different ways in today’s world.”

Read more here. 

Joe Nocera, a business columnist for the New York Times, writes about how he misses the pre-Rupert Murdoch Wall Street Journal.

Nocera writes, “Mr. Murdoch believes that the country is yearning for a national conservative daily, so that is where he is taking The Wall Street Journal. He is also an old-fashioned news hound, so he’s pushing for straighter, snappier, less analytical stories. As the owner — and as a man with a very clear vision of what he wants — he has every right to impose those changes.

“But to me — and I’m speaking now not as a someone who works for a competitor but as someone who has always adored reading The Wall Street Journal — the paper he is producing is less distinctive, less interesting and less important to its core business readership. The Journal of yore always assumed that its readers knew the basic facts of a big story, so it worked hard to find new, fresh angles that required smart reporting and original thinking. The old Journal could barely bring itself to publish a quarterly earnings story without putting it in context for the reader. Most painful for me are the memories I have of the rollicking Wall Street Journal narrative that was such a staple — a behind-the-scenes story about some shenanigans inside a company that only The Journal would ferret out and tell. Nobody else in journalism wrote those stories on a regular basis, and now that The Journal has largely stopped writing them I fear they are going to disappear, like an ancient dialect that dies out.

“I’ll never stop subscribing to The Journal, just like I’ll never stop subscribing to The New Yorker. But it used to be that on days when I was too busy to read it, I feared I was missing something. This week, I realized, I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Read more here.

Troy Graham of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports thats real estate developer Donald Trump has won a battle to require New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to be deposed in his defamation lawsuit against Times business journalist Timothy O’Brien for a book he wrote about Trump.

Graham writes, “In November, Trump’s lawyers sent a subpoena to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seeking to question him about an e-mail exchange with reporter Timothy L. O’Brien, author of the 2005 biography TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.

“In the exchange, O’Brien predicted that Trump would ‘go ballistic’ over portions of the book, including an assertion that the Donald’s net worth was actually from $150 million to $250 million, an amount not in keeping with Trump’s billionaire persona.

“Sulzberger sought to quash the subpoena, but this month the New York Supreme Court said he must submit to a deposition.”

Read more here. 

Hal Morris, writing on his Grumpy Editor blog, takes issue with the Associated Press story about the latest Gross Domestic Product statistics, noting that it’s too negative for what the numbers show.

Morris writes, “In reporting the GDP gain in a lengthy piece, Washington-based AP economics writer Jeannine Aversa promptly gave it a negative twist by inserting a ‘but’ in the first line of the lead: ’The economy pulled out of a dangerous rough patch in the spring, thanks largely to strong exports, but the rebound isn’t expected to last.’

Aversa continues her lead with:  ‘Economic slowdowns overseas could make exports tail off just as Americans are hunkering down after the bracing impact of rebate checks wanes, plunging the country into another rut later this year.’

“All this without attribution.

“A few paragraphs later, she works in ‘Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has warned the economy will be weak through the rest of 2008.’” 

Read more here.

Kaja Whitehouse of the New York Post writes Friday about the prepared obituary of Apple CEO Steve Jobs that was briefly published by Bloomberg News, quoting a company spokeswoman as defending the editor who let it happen.

Whitehouse writes, “Still, the timing couldn’t have been worse as the draft obit, which a reader sent to gawker.com, comes amid rampant speculation about Jobs’ health following sightings earlier this year of him looking thin.

“Bloomberg has yet to identify the person behind the slip-up, but fingers have pointed to James Greiff, a high-ranking columns editor in charge of obits and letters to the editor.

“Greiff declined to comment, and Czelusniak didn’t respond to requests for comment about Greiff’s role.

“Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matt Winkler is infamous for his impatience with gaffes, but Czelusniak said chatter that heads would roll is ‘nonsense,’ adding, ‘We stand behind our employees.’”

Read more here. 

John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal writes Thursday about the increasing clout of Carilion Health System in Roanoke, Va., and mentions the tension between the health care provider and the local newspaper, the Roanoke Times.

Carreyrou writes, “As tension between Carilion and Roanoke’s independent doctors grew in 2006, a group of 200 doctors formed an organization called the Coalition for Responsible Healthcare to protest the Carilion Clinic plan. The group posted a petition on its Web site and put up billboards around Roanoke that read: ‘Carilion Clinic. Big Dream. Big Questions.’ The local newspaper, the Roanoke Times, covered the controversy in a series of articles written by its health-care reporter, Jeff Sturgeon.

“A few months later, in March 2007, the Roanoke Times moved Mr. Sturgeon off the health-care beat after Carilion complained repeatedly about his coverage. Carilion says it communicated its displeasure to the paper’s editors, but never asked that Mr. Sturgeon be reassigned. Carilion withdrew most of its advertising from the paper, but says it did that as part of a reallocation of its ad budget. ‘Any friction that exists between an organization like us and the media is entirely appropriate,’ Mr. Earnhart says.

“Mr. Sturgeon, who now covers transportation, declined requests for comment. Carole Tarrant, the Roanoke Times’s editor, said: ‘We’re covering Carilion like we always have and always will, and have no plans to change how we cover Carilion.’ She declined to elaborate.”

Read more here.

Ryan Tate of Gawker reports that Bloomberg News mistakenly published its prepared obituary of Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Wednesday.

Tate writes, “But news organizations routinely prepare obituaries in advance, even for the healthy. And if Bloomberg readers had seen the internal story slug, ‘testjobs,’ their jitters might have abated. The obit, which we’ve obtained and reprinted after the jump, is a bit macabre to read but should not scare you out of your Apple shares. (UPDATE: Bloomberg has “retracted” its obituary, and the retraction is also after the jump.) More interesting are the accompanying notes for Bloomberg reporters!

“The obituary contains nothing to indicate Bloomberg has new information on Jobs’s health, at least in our quick skim.

“But the reporting notes do reveal that near the top of Bloomberg’s list of people to call in event of his death is Jobs’s ex girlfriend Heidi Roizen (quite the Valley switchboard, apparently) and California attorney general and (like Jobs) cranky aging hippie Jerry Brown. Also, Bloomberg doesn’t seem to have many people’s cell phone numbers.”

Read more here.