Biz journalism: Paying too much attention to inside baseball

Former BusinessWeek reporter Gary Weiss notes that the New York Stock Exchange is going public Wednesday, and is getting some coverage in the financial media.

Why? asks Weiss.

He writes, “The financial media spends far too much of its limited resources pursuing inside-baseball stuff of little interest to anyone north of Chambers Street. After Dick Grasso’s self-destruction in September 2003, you could barely find a sheet of newspaper to line a litterbox without finding a story with ‘NYSE’ or ‘Grasso’ somewhere. It was ridiculous.”

“As I say in you-know-what, the actual location where a stock is traded — whether it is a ‘trading floor’ or a ‘trading ceiling’ or a computer network or whatever — is a matter of little consequence to most investors. True, it matters greatly to high-volume institutional traders. The rest of us couldn’t, and shouldn’t, care less.

“The same thing goes for the ‘governance’ of the NYSE. Again, who cares? If the NYSE wants to be a paragon of lousy management, that is of little concern to anyone except the NYSE’s owners, who are currently 3,000 or so retired millionaire seatholders.”

Read his posting here.