Retail coverage should focus on profits, not sales

The Street.com’s Marek Fuchs is still wondering why all of the Black Friday coverage of the Christmas shopping season is focusing on sales and not what really matters to these retailers — profits. Fuchs wrote, “Please hold The Business Press Maven’s guiding hand for a moment here so he can walk you through the confusion […]

Diller slams NY Times coverage of executive compensation

Media executive Barry Diller slammed shareholder governance groups and the New York Times coverage of executive compensation at the Reuters Media Summitt in New York on Monday. Reuters reporter Martha Graybow noted that Diller received $295 million in compensation last year. Graybow wrote, “Diller also said he laughed after reading a New York Times op-ed […]

Assessing the Black Friday coverage

The coverage of today’s retail shopping story was all across the map — literally. In Arizona, the story was about shoppers eschewing the mall for the great outdoors, while in Maine, the story was shoppers heading to the mail to avoid the weather. That’s what makes covering the frenzy of shoppers on the day after […]

When robots write business news

CFO magazine has an interesting item about how Thomson Financial and Reuters are now both using computers to help write news stories. At Thomson, computers are writing some earnings stories. The downside, according to one person quoted in the story, is that when companies realize that it’s computers writing the stories about their earnings and […]

What did Paulsen say? Who knows?

John Carney on Dealbreaker.com notes the vast difference between the Boston Globe headline and the Reuters headline for the same story — a speech given by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen. Paulson Either Did Or Didn’t Say Something Yesterday Paulsen makes the case for tougher enforcement of securities laws Boston Globe, November 21, 2006 Paulsen says […]

H-P earnings stories, save WSJ, miss the mark

TheStreet.com’s Marek Fuchs examined the coverage Friday of computer company Hewlett-Packard’s earnings, and he believes that the wire services missed what caused the drop in the stock price. The reason it dropped, he argued, was that the company was forecasting the same growth even after a restructuring. It had nothing to do with the scandal […]

Reuters and Forbes to provide TV content for TiVo

Business news wire Reuters and business magazine Forbes have agreed to develop video content for TiVo, according to a news release. The broadband video content from Reuters will include Reuters Showbiz Week, Reuters Technology Week and Reuters Oddly Enough: And Finally show, which is a wrap-up of the week’s most interesting offbeat stories. The content […]

Reuters invests in blog syndication network

Business news wire service Reuters Group Plc has invested $7 million in an Austin, Texas-based blog syndication company that counts among its customers The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, according to a Reuters story. Eric Auchard wrote, “Pluck operates the world’s biggest blog syndication network, called BlogBurst, which connects newspapers and other media […]

AOL buys financial news service

Internet company AOL, which is part of Time Warner Inc., has acquired New York-based Relegence Corp., a company that has a financial news service and information search technology, according to a Reuters story. The story stated, “The agreement to buy privately-held Relegence was signed and closed on Monday, AOL said. Financial terms were not disclosed. […]

Former Reuters editor still wonders why he was fired

Joe Maguire, the former Reuters markets editor and author of Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter, is still wondering what he did to force the international business news wire service to let him go when the book was published, according to a Q&A in Gelf Magazine. Here are some excerpts: GM: Did the […]