CNBC.com unleashes the Carney inside all of us

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

John Carney is a senior editor at CNBC.com, covering Wall Street, hedge funds, financial regulation and other business news. Prior to joining CNBC.com, Carney was the editor of Clusterstock.com and DealBreaker.com.

Earlier this month, CNBC.com launched a new section to its site called “NetNet with John Carney,” which is providing a sometimes irreverent look at Wall Street and market news. (Talking Biz News broke the news of the site here.) For example, the site has the slogan “All this talk of Basel is making me hungry” at the top on Wednesday afternoon. And one of the stories Wednesday is about a junior investment banker at Goldman Sachs who has released two hip-hop albums.

On his blog, CNBC.com managing editor Allen Wastler wrote Wednesday that NetNet is “Carney unleashed” and that “You’ll find insider stories, trader gossip, and various tales of the foibles of the moneyed crowd. You’ll also get some pretty sharp commentary about what’s happening in the financial world and how the pinstripe elite is likely to profit off it.”

Carney was widely lauded for his hour-by-hour reporting on the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and his in-depth reports on the turmoil inside of Merrill Lynch in the year leading up to its sale to Bank of America.

He has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Sun, Page Six Magazine, Gawker, TheAtlantic.com, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, Fortune and New York magazine.

Before joining Dealbreaker, Carney practiced corporate law at firms such as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Latham & Watkins, primarily representing banks, hedge funds and private equity firms. He received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Carney graduated Summa Cum Laude from the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Carney spoke with Talking Biz News by telephone on Wednesday about the new site. What follows is an edited transcript.

How did this new site come about?

It’s been in the plan since I joined with CNBC to launch a Web site that would be quickly updated throughout the day and focus on Wall Street and be built for a Wall Street readership. CNBC has a successful Web site, but not anything that it so targeted and aimed at financial professionals. That’s what we’re doing.

Does the world need another site covering Wall Street?

Yes. I think it does actually. When I started Dealbreaker, there weren’t very many sites doing this at all. Now there are a lot of Web sites are out there, and there are a lot of really good ones. You’ll get a lot of commentary on things going on at Wall Street, but there’s not a lot of breaking news.

I have a history of getting the news that other people haven’t been able to get. I don’t think you can get too much reporting on Wall Street. What Wall Street does affects the economy and every single person in the world, so we should pay attention.

How will NetNet differentiate itself from those other sites?

The attitude that we’re going to take is that we’re not writing it for the largest mass audience. We’re writing it for the Wall Street readership. That is one differential. We want to be open to outsiders, but we want the content to be geared to a specific audience. Traditionally, you looked at sections of newspapers and they covered specific topics. Instead, I look at this as focusing by audience. That differentiates us. I will cover things outside of straight business news because that is what this audience wants.

What did you learn at Dealbreaker and Clusterstock/Business Insider that you’re applying now?

One thing I learned is that people want fast content and want it frequently updated. They don’t want to be overwhelmed by it. They want you to be the curator. They want interesting takes, but they don’t want every single thing that happens. CNBC.com breaks lots of news, but people place value in an editor to select stories and bring them angles that they may not have seen elsewhere without overwhelming them too much.

How much of an edge will there be?

I like to think that I am a pretty contrarian, cantankerous, disruptive person, and the site is going to reflect my personality. I am running this, and this is going to be a site that I am editing, so it’s going to reflect my personality. It will also reflect the other contributors as well. We don’t want to suppress other voices. We want to emphasize them.

Who do you see as the primary target audience?

I assume it will skew a bit young because they’re reading the Internet more frequently. The guys a level or two below Jamie Dimon probably read the Internet more than Jamie Dimon does. Some of the early Wall Street sites skewed very young, but as time went on, we discovered that some of the most senior people on Wall Street are reading.

Who is the better business journalist, you or one of your brothers? (Tim Carney covers the intersection of politics and government for the Washington Examiner, while Brian Carney is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal who won a Loeb Award in 2009.)

(Laughs) I am the better business journalist.

Brian is a great business editorialist. I am a reporter. Unfortunately for Brian, most of his writing appears without a byline, so he doesn’t have quite as much freedom as I do. But he gets to live in London and I commute to New Jersey.

Tim is at the Washington Examiner, where he is senior political reporter. He has written two books. One is called “Obamanomics,” and the other is called “The Big Ripoff.” We talk frequently.

We’ve all been a big help to each other figuring out how to cover stories.

How does someone go from being a Skadden Arps attorney to a Web-based business journalist?

Through good fortune and hard work. I used to take notes in meeting when I was an M&A lawyer — not that I needed to — on the way people said things because I was so fascinated by the way people described things and the language they used. After years of doing that, the stories were so good I wanted to branch out and do something else. I initially thought I would do it for six months. But the story of Wall Street is so good that I decided I wanted to keep telling it. I really look at the way I cover Wall Street as a continuing, unfolding story.