Adler shakes up BusinessWeek
Marketwatch media columnist Jon Friedman continues his analysis of the business magazines with a column Friday on the changes that new editor Stephen Adler has made at BusinessWeek since he took over in 2005. It should be noted that Friedman once worked at BusinessWeek, as did I. Adler has had to overcome the perception that […]
Media acquitted with Enron verdict
The Houston Chronicle’s Rick Casey has a nice front-page column in Friday noting that the Enron jury found the business media, who had been blamed by defendants Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling of causing the company’s downfall, not guilty. But the media, he notes, was guilt of writing overly positive stories about Enron. Casey writes, […]
Enron verdict stories out quickly on the Internet
The media has inundated the Internet with stories about the Enron verdict, which was announced at noon Eastern Standard Time. Some of them are standing out for their comprehensiveness in what the case means, showing that there were a number of business journalists prepared for the verdict. If you’ve never covered a white collar criminal […]
Kudos to biz reporters on options backdating coverage
John R. Austin, an organizational behavior professor at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, lauds the recent coverage in the financial press regarding the options backdating scandal, as well as the academics who helped uncover this issue, on his “Monty’s Bluff” blog. And he offers a suggestion on where the reporting should go next. Austin […]
SEC filings may not be as good in disclosure
BusinessWeek’s Dawn Kopecki has a great story posted on the magazine’s Web site and in other places on the Internet today about how President Bush has given his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, the power to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. In other words, companies can omit information from their […]
Does business journalism attract the best minds today?
Willy Stern, a former writer for Forbes, BusinessWeek and other publications, writes in the Nashville Scene how the journalism business has changed, and he argues that the most important change has been in the talent in the newsroom. Stern writes, “We journalists are an I.Q.-driven profession. In business school terms, our primary source of capital […]
Deadline Club winners dominated by biz journalism
Although there is two categories for business journalism, the winners of many of the other categories for the Deadline Club contest, organized by the New York chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, were business journalists or stories about how business is affecting society. Ellen Schultz of the Wall Street Journal, for example, won in […]
The BofA story that just won't die
TheDeal.com Executive Editor Yvette Kantrow notes that a recent BusinessWeek story on how Bank of America wants to build an investment banking business sounds awfully familiar. Last year, CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo posed the same question to BofA CEO Ken Lewis. In 2003, both AFX and Reuters wrote the story. In 1999, it was American Banker […]
The future of mass communication?
Ken Yarmosh has an interesting comment on the future of blogging and the Internet on the TCS Daily this morning, and he gives a plug to the BusinessWeek blog written by Steve Baker and Heater Green. Yarmoush writes, “More and more traditional print publications are getting their writers to blog. Essentially, these writer/bloggers act as […]
Requiring an economics degree
Harvard University economics professor Greg Mankiw, as well as Cal-Berkeley’s Brad DeLong, have been blogging in the past 24 hours about how to make business and economics journalism better. Here is Mankiw’s solution: “Here’s my radical suggestion to the editors of the world: Require all your economics reporters to have an undergraduate degree in economics. […]
