LinkedIn IPO coverage falls short

Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review has a good analysis of where the business media fell down when writing about the initial public offering of social media company LinkedIn.

Chittum writes, “Unfortunately, the WSJ short-arms this story. It doesn’t give us key data that it should have to fully tell the LinkedIn valuation story. Where’s the revenue number, for instance? That’s basic, must-have stuff, and it’s not here.

“The only numbers we get are that LinkedIn had a $15 million profit last year and, that ‘The sale of hiring tools to recruiters made up 49% of first-quarter revenue, up from 27% in 2008,’ which means just about nothing without context, and user numbers, which have gone up an impressive tenfold in four years and are still growing fast.

“If you combine the WSJ’s LinkedIn story with ones in The New York Times and Financial Times today, you’d probably come up with a pretty good piece. On its own, though, the NYT and FT fall short, too.

“The NYT buries any mention of concerns over tech valuations in the third-to-last paragraph.”

Read more here.