TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Editor’s note: This is the fourth interview in a series of discussions with top people in business journalism to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Talking Biz News.
Glenn Hall is the editor of TheStreet.com, the financial news site started in November 1996. He oversees oversee news coverage for TheStreet.com’s network of sites, including the flagship TheStreet.com, StockPickr.com, MainStreet.com and BankingMyWay.com.
Hall joined the site in 2008 after spending three years at the Orange County Register, where he was chief innovation officer, responsible for expansion into new digital platforms such as mobile phones and Amazon’s Kindle and other new product development opportunities. He also supervised all business and financial news at the paper.
Before that, Hall was with Bloomberg News for a decade in a variety of positions, including government team leader, transportation team leader, European consumer team leader and Amsterdam bureau chief.
Hall, who is also a Loeb Awards judge, talking about TheStreet.com’s place in business journalism and the overall industry in an e-mail interview. What follows is an edited transcript.
What role do you see TheStreet.com playing in business journalism?
We’re trying to take business journalism to the next level by translating financial news and information into actionable ideas. For the investor audiences on TheStreet.com and Stockpickr.com, that means providing deeper analysis into the impact news and events will have on particular stocks and connecting our reporting to trading ideas from professionals who provide their expert advice to our users. For the consumer audiences on our MainStreet.com and BankingMyWay.com sites, we deliver personal finance tips and advice in a useful and entertaining way that builds on popular news and themes that are part of the Zeitgeist. The overarching goal is to provide the news, advice and tools to empower people to live richer and more fulfilled lives. That may sound a little highfalutin, but we really mean it.
Who do you see as your main competition, and what advantages do you have in comparison?
We keep an eye on a long list of friends and friendly rivals, including (in no particular order) News Corp.’s family of outlets – especially MarketWatch, the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s — the New York Times business section, Bloomberg/Businessweek, Thomson Reuters, Fortune, Forbes, CNBC, CNN Money, and of course Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and AOL DailyFinance. We also have partnerships with many of those “rivals” (more on that later).
Our advantage, and a relatively unique calling card of TheStreet, is our focus on “actionable” news. We seek to connect the dots between the news and what people should do with it. Our mission is to break down information barriers, level the playing field and help people make the best possible decisions about earning, investing, saving and spending money. We can do this because we have a unique combination of staff-written news and analysis alongside expert advice from a host of respected investors, analysts, fund managers and personal finance experts who share their insights through our network.
We also know how to have fun! We recognize that while finance is serious, covering it doesn’t have to be boring. Just take a look at our weekly series “The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street,” which runs every Friday, and you’ll see what I mean. Our reporters and columnists have the experience and knowledge to cut to the chase and tell it like it is, and our audiences appreciate that approach. More and more, consumers of financial news and information are looking for help to figure out what they should do with their money. We’re here to guide them. That’s what we do.
The site’s brand of business journalism is much different than what you were used to in Orange County. How did you adjust?
The differences aren’t as profound as you might imagine. Orange County is home to a large and sophisticated investor community – don’t forget that bond guru Bill Gross and stock legend Warren Buffett both have homes there. As a result, we always had investors in mind at the Orange County Register even though the newspaper and its Web sites are more oriented toward the general consumer.
One big difference, though, is the national/international scope of TheStreet compared with the “hyper-local” emphasis at the Register. Fortunately, I can draw on more than a decade of global investment coverage at Bloomberg, and combine that with the understanding of individual user needs I gained at the Register, to better serve the retail investor and consumer audiences that we attract to TheStreet’s network of sites.
Another adjustment, and one that I have gladly embraced, relates to the unique opportunities of an Internet-based news business. The art of storytelling takes on greater potential when we blend on-the-scene video reporting and interactive graphics into our narratives. This combination of sights, sounds, data and compelling prose creates an experience that educates, informs and entertains in a way that can have greater impact than any of those elements on their own. This requires us to be creative and innovative every day, with every “story” we tell. (I put “story” in quotes because the word means so much more online). It’s a challenge that I relish.
What type of business journalism is more effective?
I’m going to have to cite my own playbook here – actionable journalism is the most effective. The world is filled with noise — news, information, data, images, commentary, e-mails, alerts, Facebook posts, Tweets, Diggs, Buzzes, etc. — bombarding people from every angle all the time. Most people can use a little help cutting through the clutter and figuring out what it all means. I don’t think it’s enough to simply tell people what happened, they need help figuring out what to do. I’m not saying journalists should explicitly tell people what to do, but I do think we should provide the insight, analysis and expert recommendations that help people understand their options.
Should TheStreet.com be covering other topics beside stocks and Wall Street?
Glad you asked because we do. It’s a common misperception that TheStreet only covers stocks. We obviously focus on Wall Street – as our name suggests – but we also cover Main Street. In fact, we have a site called MainStreet.com that caters to a broader consumer base under the motto “Where Life and Money Intersect.” On TheStreet.com itself, we have first-rate technology coverage that looks at the gadgets as well as the stocks, and we also have reporters covering small business, leisure, travel, luxury and shopping. We even delve into sports and are gearing up for our annual College Football Corner.
If you’re looking for a sign that we’re serious about broadening our horizons, then I should mention that we recently added a general news beat to cover non-business stories of national significance. We are bringing our brand of no-nonsense journalism to new areas, but we’ll always remain true to our origins on Wall Street. In fact, I think we’re the last financial media organization with a Wall Street address.
The site recently struck some content sharing deals with other media. How does that fit into your strategy?
There are no islands on the Internet. Everything and everyone is interconnected in a myriad ways that allow users to move around easily and quickly. Consumers and investors are particularly mobile in this way, and it makes sense – whether you’re looking to buy a new gadget or invest in a stock, you’re likely to check out several sites to get different perspectives. It’s the same with news and commentary. TheStreet is embracing that mobility and making it as easy as possible for users to find our great content alongside other quality content from select partners, whether on our sites or theirs.
These relationships are symbiotic, allowing us to offer a wider variety of news and information by tapping into trusted sources like Newsweek, one of our new partners. In return, we help our partners supplement their coverage with our highly specialized reporting on stocks, markets and personal finance. Our new affiliation with the “Nightly Business Report” on PBS is also built on sharing our investing expertise with their television audience. By working together, TheStreet is able to help NBR satisfy viewer demand for investing ideas and, at the same time, raise the profile of our reporters and our brand. In a similar way, we are able to gain broader distribution for our personal finance content on MainStreet and TheStreet by helping supplement the services offered by Bundle, a new money management Website.
Those are just a few examples of our many partnerships. Simply put, our strategy is to bring our news and commentary to readers wherever they may look, and give them the very best of the Web when they come to visit our sites.
What other new ways is the company looking to expand its brand and content?
We’ve got a lot going on. For example, we have dozens of Twitter feeds, a very robust Facebook presence and a growing family of mobile products that will soon include an iPad app that offers some pretty cool functionality. We’ve already got an award-winning app for Blackberry, iPhone and Google Android devices and recently rolled out a beta version of a new mobile Web service (www.thestreet.mobi on your mobile device).
As you’ve covered in Talking Biz News before, we’re syndicating our content and continue to add new newspapers and other media outlets around the country (any editors out there who are interested can contact me directly about this at glenn.hall@thestreet.com). We’re also expanding our television presence by working with networks like CNBC to get our talent as guests on air more often, and we also are working on concepts for some syndicated video content to gain broader distribution for the great broadcast personalities we have on staff.
Our premium sites and other subscription products are getting some amazing upgrades as well. The new Options Profits subscription site is taking our premium products in a whole new direction, offering a host of options experts in a single product that combines expert advice, new trading tools, videos, online classes and more. There will be more premium products like this coming out soon.
Our MainStreet.com and Stockpickr.com sites also are expanding their content offerings and distribution channels, and we’re about to launch a new version of our BankingMyWay.com site that will make it easier to search our massive database of local, regional and national rates for mortgages, auto loans, CDs and more.
I’m particularly excited about a new “Consumer Comfort” index we are working on, using the comprehensive data from our RateWatch division http://www.rate-watch.com/ and our MainStreet staff to provide reports and data showing how much consumers are squeezed between what they pay in interest to banks versus what they receive for deposits. This will create a monthly barometer for the entire nation as well as each state and key cities. We’ll be able to distribute localized information for any market in the country, and we hope this is something that our colleagues at other media will be interested in receiving.
We’re constantly adding new functionality to our sites, such as live blogging, interactive charting and other tools that help users sift through data and information more efficiently. There’s much more to come, but that gives you an idea of the many initiatives in the works.
A lot of the company’s content is behind a pay wall. Do you see that strategy increasing with other business news sites?
TheStreet has a long and successful track record with subscription services, so it’s been interesting for us to watch other media groups working to develop their own paid content model. We’ve proven that a hybrid system can leverage high-quality free news and information to generate advertising revenue and feed into subscription products. This is something of the holy grail for media companies, so I’m certain that many others will increasingly offer their own hybrid models.
It’s not easy, though. To be successful with subscription services, other news sites will need to have a unique value proposition. It’s hard to sell something that can easily be found for free somewhere else. In order to get people to part with their money, you have to offer greater value in return. It works for TheStreet because our premium services provide a level of expert investment advice that is not available for free anywhere, and that advice can help subscribers earn more money. If you can’t offer something rare, desirable and valuable, then you will have a hard time charging for it.
TheStreet.com is strongly associated with co-founder Jim Cramer. Is that a hindrance, or a help?
Jim Cramer as chairman of TheStreet and Daryl Otte as CEO both believe in the importance of high-quality, professional journalism. That’s the kind of support every editor in chief wants from a publisher. In Jim’s other role as a contributor, he is a very prolific and insightful commentator whose investing opinions are highly valued by our subscribers. At the same time, it is important to recognize that Jim is one of many well-known and talented contributors to TheStreet. We have a very deep bench on both our premium services side and our free sites. Our strength is built on the hard work of many great journalists and expert commentators.
What role did sites such as TheStreet.com play in the demise of stock listings printed — and as a result standalone business sections in many markets — in daily paper business sections?
I have a unique perspective on this as a journalist who worked in the real-time digital news business, the newspaper business and now the online news business. The way I see it, the Internet changed the world, and newspapers were too stuck in their ways to respond fast enough. The printed business sections and stock pages are casualties of the Internet.
This is a classic case of how hard it is for an entrenched business to respond to the changing basis of competition caused by a disruption like the Internet. This phenomenon is well documented by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, who calls it “the innovator’s dilemma.” Newspapers made what appeared to be rational business decisions aimed at defending their print revenues and consequently failed to embrace online opportunities.
TheStreet is one of the disruptive forces in this scenario because our company was established precisely to capitalize on the Internet as it gained momentum in the 1990s. We filled a need for online financial news and investing advice that emerged along with the availability of real-time digital stock data and online trading. Newspapers could have done the same thing, but they waited too long. It’s the same story with classifieds, once the bread and butter of the newspaper industry and now under the control of Internet companies like Craigslist and Monster.com.
While most investors are better served by real-time stock prices, I happen to believe that a newspaper’s core subscriber base – mostly from an older generation — might still prefer to have more printed stock listings and business news than some of the other content that survived the cuts in many markets. Yet I understand the economics that led to the decision to eliminate stock pages – they generally didn’t have advertising so there were costs for newsprint without offsetting revenue. In some cases, the savings from cutting stock pages prevented – or at least delayed – reductions in reporting staff. It seemed like the lesser of evils. No editor wanted to shrink the paper, but they didn’t have a choice after the Internet disrupted their business model.
Where would you like to see TheStreet.com improve its coverage?
Given our relative size compared with behemoths like Bloomberg, News Corp., Thomson Reuters, etc., I feel we do a great job of bringing originality, insight and added value to the daily discourse about stocks and the markets. That said, we have not produced as many exclusives or investigative projects as I would like. We’ve had some great packages — like our recent Mortgage Mayhem series that examined the ongoing plight of homeowners who’ve received no help from the government’s housing rescue plan – but I am looking forward to even more of this kind of reporting from our reporters.
In terms of specific areas of improvement, we want to expand our coverage of the commodities and energy markets, and there are still many industry segments that we would like to add to our beats. We also need to delve deeper into regulatory, economic and political issues. We’ve made some strides in these areas and are offering a broader mix of news these days (as noted earlier) but I see many opportunities ahead.
How is the newsroom coping, seven months later, with the death of your predecessor, David Morrow?
Dave’s death came as a shock to us all. It’s hard to put into words the myriad emotions that permeated the newsroom when we learned the sad news and the lingering feeling of loss that may never fully dissipate. While Dave had already moved on to new opportunities as a business journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, he left a lasting imprint on all who worked with him at TheStreet. Enough time has passed now that I think things are pretty much normal these days – a new normal, in any event. We carry on in the spirit of great journalism and integrity that is Dave’s legacy, but we also are charting a new course.
