When biz reporters are columnists

TheDeal.com executive editor Yvette Kantrow doesn’t like the fact that mergers and acquisitions reporters such as The Wall Street Journal’s Dennis Berman and the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin sometimes write news and sometimes write columns filled with their opinion.

Kantrow wrote, “Call us hopelessly old-fashioned, but we long for those now-ancient days when reporters were reporters and columnists were columnists. The latter trafficked in opinion, the former in news, and for journalists — at least of the M&A variety — the two never really met except in the cafeteria. That doesn’t mean that a reporter’s biases and feelings, or those of his employer, didn’t drift into allegedly objective news stories, or the occasional CNBC appearance. Still, in the old days, the turn of this century, say, we never really knew what deal reporters thought about the people they were covering, at least not to the extent we do now.

“But at a time when every citizen with a snowman suit is considered a journalist, it makes sense that every professional journalist is being turned into a columnist, or at least a blogger, free — and even encouraged — to traffic in opinion and attitude with abandon. (We at The Deal are as guilty as anyone else of participating in this trend.)”

Read more here.