What is DealBook anyway?

Nick Summers of The New York Observer writes about Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and its DealBook section of business news, noting its growing importance at the paper as well as its critics.

Summers writes, “DealBook critics often invoke Politico as they attempt to describe how the outlets’ obsession with velocity and micro-scoops (‘Get there fast. Get there first’ reads one DealBook slogan) requires suspending old-fashioned journalistic traits like skepticism and distrust of institutions, not to mention deep sourcing and nuance, and draw similarities between Politico’s lusty cheering-on of partisan warfare and DealBook’s chummy relationship with the bankers who took the economy to the brink.

“It is true that DealBook has adopted the tone of much of the rest of Web journalism, which comes across as more participatory and clubby than distanced and skeptical.

“Mr. Sorkin offers no apologies, arguing that his creation is often deeply critical of Wall Street, and invoking Politico as a DealBook model himself. (Also, TechCrunch, another site notorious for rapacious but often-wrong coverage.) ‘What Politico does so well is they speak to a community,’ Mr. Sorkin told The Observer. ‘But they do it tonally—in a way that’s both accessible, and at some level probably even aspirational, so that people who are not inside the Beltway can feel O.K. dropping in, and getting a peek inside the window of this world. And that’s what DealBook can do to the business community. We can write stories and tell a narrative, and yet do it in a way that’s accessible enough, and maybe even aspirational enough, for other people, including the broader Times readership.'”

Read more here.