OLD Media Moves

Four business journalists on NYObserver's "insurgents" of 2010

December 23, 2009

The New York Observer has a list of the 53 “insurgents” who will help remake the city in 2010, and four of them are business journalists. They are:

  • Bess Levin, editor of the blog Dealbreaker.com;
  • Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone;
  • Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times;
  • Josh Tyrangiel, the new editor of BusinessWeek.

For Levin, who is called the most important Wall Street blogger in the country, Max Abelson writes, “But Dealbreaker has a certain crackle — a taste for picking out and serving up the day’s fascinating little nuggets of finance news. It’s a must-read. The powerful hedge fund manager Cliff Asness, for example, logged on to the site’s comments section last year to complain about ‘vicious animal liars like this Beth Levin creature.’

“In the past month alone, Ms. Levin has written about conversations with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (he hadn’t been playing his guitar ‘in like a year’ — and showed his lack of calloused fingertips to prove it), and with the scandal-plagued billionaire Steven A. Cohen. ‘But ladies, I will confess,’ she said about Mr. Cohen, who was accompanied by a bodyguard with a gun, ‘he was cool. Seriously.’

“Her boss, site publisher David Minkin, said she’s an excellent employee, except for the random songs she hums out loud, ‘really loud,’ at her desk.

“‘I have to figure out a way to say this without sounding dismissive: I just really never cared about Wall Street,’ she said last week at Mott Street’s Café Gitane, a few doors down from Dealbreaker’s headquarters. ‘I had just fallen into it. So I was like, ‘I’ll talk to these guys, I don’t care! They’re not going to scare me.’’

Read more here

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