Categories: OLD Media Moves

Business news coverage and the Facebook IPO

Arthur Brisbane, the reader representative of The New York Times, writes for Sunday’s paper about how it could have done a better job of being skeptical about the Facebook initial public offering.

Brisbane writes, “One journalist who did focus intently on the risks before the I.P.O. was Eileen Brown, a social media business consultant who blogs for the ZDNet technology Web site. In a series of posts, she dissected the Facebook prospectus and laid out the risks facing the company — and she told me later that she had come away from the exercise with increasing doubts about the I.P.O.

“She said the ‘fire hose of information’ about Facebook — on the Web and in print, in specialized and general media — made it very difficult for small investors to assess the company.

“In my view, that is one reason that The Times should have provided more focus for general-interest readers, who needed help cutting through the clutter. More coverage aimed at small investors may well have led to more scrutiny of the risks.

“But with its specialized finance blog, DealBook, plus its general-news mission over all, the paper is committed to two audiences, and that is a challenge.

Larry Ingrassia, the business editor, told me the paper writes ‘for a broad and intelligent audience of generalists but also with sophistication for a more informed specialist audience so that they feel that they are learning something from what we are writing.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

Recent Posts

McGraw Center for Biz Journalism hands out five grants

Five veteran journalists have been named the latest recipients of the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism.…

49 mins ago

Fox Business anchor Cavuto is departing

Neil Cavuto, the first anchor hired by Fox News in 1996, is leaving the network,…

50 mins ago

Wired seeks a features director

WIRED is looking for an experienced, collaborative, deeply invested leader to oversee our ambitious, award-winning…

1 hour ago

Brower, formerly with Business Insider, hired by Ankler as executive editor

Ankler, which covers the entertainment industry, has hired Alison Brower as its executive editor. Brower was…

1 hour ago

MLex starts AI, intellectual property news services

Regulatory news service MLex said Thursday it has launched services covering artificial intelligence and intellectual…

2 hours ago

Sinha departs S&P Global for Charlottesville Tomorrow

Charlottesville Tomorrow has hired S&P Global's Akash Sinha as its managing editor. Tamica Jean-Charles of Charlottesville Tomorrow writes,…

3 hours ago