Three of top 10 media events in past decade were biz journalism

Marketwatch media columnist Jon Friedman, celebrating his 10th year as a media writer, compiles his list of the top 10 most intriguing events in the industry in the past decade, and three of them are business journalism related.

Here they are:

3. The acquisition of Dow Jones: News Corp. accomplished the unthinkable by scooping up the company that owned The Wall Street Journal and other media platforms. While many pundits initially recoiled in horror, the “new” Journal — both in print and online — is a snappy, wide-ranging operation that continues to put the news first. (News Corp. is also the parent of MarketWatch, the publisher of this column.)

9. The Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer smackdown: Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” dressed down Jim Cramer, the loud talker from CNBC, in the wake of the financial crisis. Fair or not, Stewart accused Cramer and CNBC of failing to educate viewers and relying on show-biz flourishes instead of solid information about the Wall Street meltdown.

10. The closure of Portfolio: The “Gigli” of magazines was the most-hyped launch in recent publishing history. But Conde Nast’s business magazine failed to bump Fortune, BusinessWeek and Forbes out of the picture and became a poster child of the media’s bitter recession.

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