A day late, a dollar short

Former BusinessWeek writer Gary Weiss notes that the Salt Lake Tribune got around to reporting on the departure of Overstock.com‘s head of internal finance controls a week after he left, but the effort was weak.

Weiss writes, “By the way, just assuming for a moment that there is a connection with the Big Money article, or it was other than a happy-as-a-lark mutual thing, this latest Johnson pronouncement means that Overstock has yet another shareholder-disclosure issue. It’s not copacetic for a company to publicly lie about why key execs leave.

“I really don’t know any other statewide newspaper in the country worth its salt that does such a shoddy job of covering a major newsmaker within its borders. Was the Trib deliberately taking a dive for Overstock or does it simply not know how to do its job? I honestly don’t know. I will say this about the Deseret News: it’s not worried about appearances. It wouldn’t write anything negative about Byrne if he was arrested for a triple homicide.

“Except for the Big Money and occasional articles in non-Utah newspapers, the only time Overstock’s sliminess is ever analyzed is by blogs, notably white collar crime expert Sam Antar. He has a further analysis today of what Chidester’s departure means.”

Read more here.