Talking Biz News

Information about business
journalism from the
Carolina Business News Initiative.

Chris Peacock, executive editor and vice president of CNNMoney.com, has been named to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers board effective Aug. 31.

Peacock will fill the term of Bill Choyke, who is leaving the board, until the next board election at the society’s annual conference in March.

“Chris brings to the board a strong background in online business journalism as editor of CNNMoney.com and before that in overseeing online content at Fortune Group Online,” said Greg McCune, SABEW’s president. “He has strong links to broadcast through CNN, and to magazines through Fortune and Money — both areas where SABEW needs to strengthen its presence.”

At CNN, Peacock is responsible for the financial site’s content strategy and product. He works closely with the business and technology teams to identify new opportunities for the CNNMoney.com brand. The site attracts more than 8 million unique visitors a month, according to Nielsen.

Peacock joined Fortune Group Online in 2001 and served as executive editor and vice president there, overseeing all of the group’s online editorial content.

Martin Wolk, the executive business editor of MSNBC.com, writes Monday about the Web sites new stock page.

Wolk writes, “To be quite honest, this change is long overdue. Msnbc.com users depend on us for the latest business news and deserve an easy way to track and research companies and investment ideas. With this new feature we take a major step toward a more complete integration of news and stock information.

“Data for the new stock quote pages come from Interactive Data Corp., a leading provider of  financial information to institutions and investors, which worked with msnbc.com to create the customized offering.

“‘Together we were able to develop a solution to help msnbc.com’s users more effectively analyze comprehensive financial data in order to make investment decisions,’ said Luan Cox, general manager of Interactive Data Managed Solutions for the Americas.”

Read more here.

The Fox Business Network will provide stock updates to the Tennis Channel during the U.S. Open, according to an announcement Monday.

In return, the business news network will run updates on the tennis matches.

Monday through Friday, Fox Business Network’s ”Money For Breakfast” will feature the “Court Report” with recaps from the previous day’s U.S. Open matches. The Tennis Channel will break into U.S. Open coverage at market close to give viewers the “Fox Business Network Update,” a summary of all the market moves from the day.

The Tennis Channel’s Kevin Frazier will anchor the “Court Report” on Fox Business every morning at 8:20 a.m. ET while Fox Business Network’s David Asman anchor “Fox Business Network Update” on The Tennis Channel every day at 6 p.m. ET to recap the markets movers and shakers.

In addition, Fox Business and the Tennis Channel will kick off their partnership on Monday with a tournament outside Fox Business headquarters in Manhattan. Tennis duo Bob and Mike Bryan will be on hand to challenge fans and anchors in a two vs. two mini-tournament that will air on Fox Business.

Read more here. 

The Economist now has more than 800,000 subscribers in North America, according to ABC numbers released Monday morning. That’s an 8.5 percent increase from the same time a year ago.

The total number of North American subscribers at the end of June was 810,821.

Worldwide, the magazine now has more than 1.4 million subscribers, a 6 percent increase from the same time in 2008.

“The Economist is for anyone who wants to make sense of the world,” said Alan Press, senior vice president, marketing, in a statement. “Our consistent global growth over the last 26 years shows that there are more and more curious people who seek out intelligence and insight and have discovered that The Economist offers both.”

Subscribers in continental Europe totaled 239,298, an increase of 2 percent. In the United Kingdom, subscribers totaled 187,341, an increase of 3 percent.

David Carr of the New York Times writes about the overhaul at The Journal News in Westchester County, N.Y., that resulted in the business news staff being eliminated.

Carr writes, “One longtime worker who received a manila envelope, but still asked to remain anonymous — ‘This is not a great time for me to make waves’ — was bitter about the process.

“‘How is the fact that I don’t have a Twitter or Facebook account relevant to what I do?’ he said. ‘After many years of great work here, I have to go into some office and tell a person who I have never met why I deserve to work at The Journal. I probably didn’t do a good enough job of hiding my disgust.’

“Confronted by the Hobbesian prospect of lobbying for a job they thought they already had, some simply said no thanks. The majority of the sales staff in the Rockland office — eight out of 11 people — declined to reapply and took severance. Most chose to participate, though, because in the current environment, the management has all the leverage. Anybody who leaves journalism right now will probably not find a way back in.

“‘I don’t feel like a winner even though I still have my job,’ said Ernie Garcia, a staff writer who covers Yonkers who credited his management with being straightforward and honest throughout the process. Still, he said: ‘I wish there had been a straight-up layoff. This was very nerve-racking and agonizing. And everyone in our business has to live with this uncertainty going forward.’”

Read more here.

Joe Weber, the chief of correspondents at BusinessWeek magazine, has left the weekly to become a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska.

The chief of correspondents overseas all of the bureaus at the magazine. A replacement has not been named. Weber is the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor of News-Editorial and associate professor of journalism

Weber also served as Chicago bureau manager. He joined BusinessWeek in June 1987 as a correspondent in Dallas. He served as Philadelphia bureau manager from January 1988 until August 1997. He then managed Canadian coverage from Toronto until December 1999.

Among his awards are an Excellence in Financial Journalism Award from the New York State Society of CPAs, two Peter Lisagor Awards from the Headline Club of Chicago, and a Distinguished Editorial Achievement Award from McGraw-Hill.

Weber is a 1977 graduate of Rutgers University and a 1981 graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The Long Island Business News, which has offered its content for free online, is switching to a paid model on Sept. 8.

Publisher John Kominicki writes, “We’ve been pretty excited about the performance of our Web site over the past year. We’ve built a dedicated audience of more than 60,000 readers, a big number for a newspaper that barely ever topped 12,000 in weekly circulation.

“But giving away the news hasn’t turned out to be much of a business model. Many advertisers are still reluctant to run online, and those that do are not willing to pay anything near the prices we command in print. Worse, our renewal and new-subscriber numbers are slipping as readers realize they can get much of what we offer for free online.

“Even more troubling: Members of the staff are asking for pay raises.

“If all goes to plan, some of the 60,000 will convert to paid subscriptions, and the rest will keep coming back to read free headline news and, we hope, visit our advertisers. If you’re already a paid subscriber, we encourage you to find your seven-digit code, which is printed each week on your mailing label, and have it handy. If you’re not a subscriber, well, why not avoid the rush?

“The decision to lock down the site has not been popular with some members of the staff, primarily the journalists, who believe they have an inalienable right to be read by as many people as possible. I started out as a reporter and understand: In our business, ego must often fill in for decent wages. Now, as publisher, I have to argue that we must focus on people willing to pay for what we write, even if that number proves to be smaller.”

Read more here.

Marco Ursi of Masthead magazine in Canada reports that six staffers of Canadian Business, as well as the founding editor in chief of MoneySense, all lost their jobs on Thursday.

Ursi writes, “Sources within Rogers Publishing Inc. told Masthead that executive editor Scott Steele, features editor Andy Holloway, staff writers Sharda Prashad and Jeff Sanford, online managing editor Greg Enright, and photo researcher David Lee were all let go by CB, while Ian McGugan is no longer with MoneySense, a magazine he helped launched in 1999. The magazines are ’strategically shifting focus,’ Khanna said. ‘Effectively all the positions will be replaced.’

“Suneel Khanna, senior director of communications at Rogers Publishing, confirmed that seven editorial jobs were lost.

“The shake-up follows the recent appointments of Ken Whyte and Steve Maich as publisher and editor-in-chief, respectively, and would seem to echo the drastic changes Whyte made at Maclean’s when he took over there in 2005.”

Read more here.

Ben LaMothe of Econsultancy interviewed BusinessWeek.com editor in chief John Byrne about the business magazine’s philosophy when it comes to online journalism.

Here is an excerpt:

What is BusinessWeek’s approach to the web?

We have one overriding goal: to have the deepest and most meaningful engagement with our audience than any other business site in the world. It’s an incredibly ambitious objective because we have set the bar high for our definition of engagement. Most other online properties define engagement as a metric. For them, it’s simply time spent on the site or pages viewed per monthly unique. We see engagement as core to what we do and how we do it.

It’s partly our willingness and our desire to collaborate with our audience, and it’s partly our ability to encourage that collaboration so you’re getting far more than world class business journalism when you come to BusinessWeek.com. 

Let me give some context here. Journalism, by and large, has been a product produced by writers and editors and delivered to an audience. That was fine when there was no technology to allow journalists to engage in an ongoing dialogue with readers and to allow for true collaboration between the writers and the readers.

What journalism needs to become is this digital age is a process that embraces and involves your audience at every level, from idea generation to reporting and sourcing and finally to the publication of the article when the journalism then becomes an intellectual camp fire around which you gather an audience to have a thoughtful conversation about the story’s topic. 

If done well, that conversation, orchestrated by the writer or editor of the article, has as much or more value to a reader as the journalism itself. 

Read more here.

Jon Friedman of Marketwatch writes Friday about former Barron’s reporter Erin Arvedlund, who has recently published a book on convicted investor Bernie Madoff.

Friedman writes, “In her book, Arvedlund is shying away from the sociological implications of the scandal and concentrating on explaining to readers how Madoff turned his once-legitimate business into a huge fraud.

“‘The two missing pieces were finding the really old people’ who could talk about the origins of the fraud ‘and how (the company) produced these phony statements,’ Arvedlund said.

“What resulted was a page-turning narrative. Like many authors, Arvedlund became happily obsessed with her work. This kind of drive can help authors persist when they feel discouraged by the weight of the work or head cold or family distraction. Of course, it also can result in a strange way of life for the author.

“‘I talk about these people like they’re my family,’ Arvedlund laughed. She set aside a specific part of her Philadelphia home where she would be free of Madoff, at least for a moment or two.”

Read more here.