Monthly Archives: June 2011
Kind of a happy accident
by Chris Roush
Bloomberg Television anchor Betty Liu talked with Tara Williams of Baristanet about her career and her personal life.
Here is an except:
Q: What drew you to financial reporting?
It was kind of a happy accident. I had all of these visions when I graduated college that I was one day going to be a foreign correspondent working for The New York Times or writing for the features section of The Times or The New Yorker magazine—those were my dreams as I was graduating UPenn.
As luck would have it after I left university, I found this posting at Dow Jones Newswires, which I had no idea it was a business newswire. I just saw that it was AP Dow Jones and I thought, “Great. It has the words AP in it.” This is part of the dream I had working overseas with the Associated Press. So I applied for the job and I became one of the copy editors for it.
But the reason why I loved it was because they told me right away that if I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, I could do so in the next couple of years, so I snatched that opportunity and knew I wanted to work overseas—I didn’t care if it was business or not—I just wanted to do it. The rest is history.
Read more here.
Bennett accepts Loeb Award
by Chris Roush
Bloomberg News’s Executive Editor Amanda Bennett accepts the 2011 Gerald Loeb Award for Magazine Writing earlier this week.
Biz journalist named to Central Michigan journalism hall of fame
by Chris Roush
Pete Engardio, a longtime business journalist and graduate of Central Michigan University, has been named to its journalism hall of fame.
Engardio, a 1980 graduate, worked for BusinessWeek magazine from 1985 to 2009, serving in the Atlanta bureau and in Hong Kong where he covered Asian business for six years. He moved to New York in 1996 as Asian editor and was editor of the Asian edition from 1999 to 2001.
Engardio recently formed his own company, Engardio Media, and resides in Brooklyn, NY.
He has won three Overseas Press Club awards for his Asian reporting. He also has won the George Polk, Loeb and Sigma Delta Chi awards.
He is recognized as a leading national expert on Asian business and co-authored or contributed to books on Asia and India. He has an MA from the University of Missouri and has been a Reuters Journalism Fellow at Oxford University.
Engardio was a CMU commencement speaker in May 2010.
Read more here.
Oregonian names new biz editor
by Chris Roush
TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Peter Bhatia, the editor of The Oregonian in Portland, made the following announcement to the staff:
Happy to announce that Scott Nelson is returning to the enterprise team as business editor. His appointment will help us as we work to beef up that coverage and in filling the two business-reporting jobs posted last week. We’re grateful to Scott for his effective efforts in leading the launch of our Portland hyperlocal work.
It wasn’t our intention to move him again so quickly, but the opportunity arose and he was pleased to take it. He has worked successfully in business in the past, for the better part of his eight years at the paper.
Scott’s varied experiences here and elsewhere will serve us well, including being embedded in Iraq while at the Boston Globe, working as personal finance editor of the Tampa Tribune and earning an MBA at the University of Maryland.
As online enterprise editor at The Oregonian, Nelson was responsible for helping develop new revenue streams at the Pacific Northwest’s largest paper. He previously served as deputy business editor and breaking news editor.
The fight against bafflegab
by Chris Roush
Pamela Yellen of The Huffington Post writes about Sylvia Porter, one of the pioneers of personal finance journalism who wrote a syndicated column for decades.
Yellen writes, “At first, as a 22-year-old financial news freelancer for the New York Evening Post in 1935, Porter was required to use the byline ‘S.F. Porter’ to mask the fact that she was a woman. But Porter’s crusading reporting, fighting for the common person and exposing financial graft, earned her a growing and loyal audience. Still ‘bearded’ as ‘S.F. Porter’ in 1938, she was made the newspaper’s financial editor and began writing a daily column.
“It took until July 1942 for the Post to finally realize that Porter’s gender might actually be an asset. It was then that the paper allowed her to write as ‘Sylvia F. Porter’ and began running her photo. Five years later, her articles became nationally syndicated and her influence and readership multiplied many times over.
“Porter, who died of emphysema just shy of her 78th birthday, spent more than a half-century advocating for financial literacy and was a firm believer that individuals can — and should — take control of their money, savings and investments. ‘I like to think I’ve contributed in some way to the increasing willingness of the American public to take on the responsibilities of the economy,’ she once said in reflecting on her accomplishments.
“Among Porter’s enduring philosophies is that education is one of the best possible personal investments; that individuals should dismiss theoretical comparisons to ‘average’ investors, since there is no such thing; and that money is more than coins and bills — it ‘can be translated into the beauty of living, a support in misfortune, an education, or future security.’”
Read more here. Porter is the only business journalist ever to appear on the cover of a mainstream magazine.
Energy company responds to negative story through Twitter
by Chris Roush
Andrew Phelps of the Nieman Journalism Lab writes about how Chesapeake Energy is using Twitter to respond to a New York Times article that quotes from company emails to suggest Chesapeake executives are overstating productivity and profitability.
Phelps writes, “Chesapeake PR responded swiftly and strongly, but with a novel social media tactic: The company bought Promoted Tweets on search terms like the hashtag #naturalgas and the Times’ primary account @nytimes. Search for either one of those terms and you’ll see the top tweet features a link to CEO Aubrey McClendon’s rebuttal. (The company is rotating multiple tweets in the promoted slot.)
“Spokesman E. Blake Jackson, who manages the @Chesapeake account, is actively replying to tweets that mention natural gas, retweeting users who link to favorable stories, and sharing links to stories from other news outlets, including a fracking-friendly Wall Street Journal editorial. (The company posted McClendon’s email-to-staffers rebuttal on Facebook, by the way, not the corporate website, to make it easily sharable.)
“Back in the day, a corporation stung by a newspaper story might try to buy a full-page ad in the paper. But that route was controlled by the very organization they were battling. Targeting PR ad dollars toward social media is another sign it isn’t just stories that can spread virally — it’s also the conversations around those stories, pro or con.”
Read more here.
Digital personal finance magazine launched
by Chris Roush
A personal finance magazine called Sustainable Money designed specifically for smart phones and tablets has been launched.
The editor is Darrell Delamaide, a veteran financial journalist who has written for Barron’s, Bloomberg News and Institutional Investor. He was also the director of AOL’s Personal Finance Channel.
“Our goal each week is to give you some takeaways that will help you save money or make money, or in some way increase your financial security,” said Delamaide in a statement. “There’s no easy way to get there. It takes many small steps, and we want to help you take a few more steps each week.”
The magazine aims to be a personal finance guide on how to manage spending to increase savings, and how to manage savings to increase wealth. Every issue will also focus on the ways spending, saving and investing make a difference in how our planet’s resources are used.
The publication will be weekly, and the first issue is free. Renewable monthly subscriptions are available for 99 cents through In-App Purchase. Annual subscriptions are available for $9.99.
Contributors to Sustainable Money include Karin Price Mueller, who writes a weekly consumer affairs column for The Star-Ledger in Newark, and Vanessa Richardson, a former staff writer for Self, Money and Red Herring.
Read more here.
Bloomberg Markets overhauls design staff
by Chris Roush
Siung Tjia, who joined Bloomberg Markets magazine as the publication’s first creative director in April, has shaken up the staff.
Four positions have been eliminated in his department, including photo editor Eric Godwin.
However, two new positions were created by Tjia and filled.
Amy Berkley is the new director of photography. She was most recently the photography director at the Outdoor Group, where she oversaw photos at three magazines, including Field & Stream.
Lily Chow is the new senior designer, who had been working at Bon Appetit magazine since February. Before that, she worked as a graphics designer at IB Branding in Portland, Ore., and then as a designer at ESPN The Magazine.
Tija had been the creative director for ESPN The Magazine for the past four years and had been the deputy art director at Rolling Stone magazine. Earlier, Tija held art director positions at Calvin Klein’s CRK Advertising, as well as at Barneys New York. He has won awards from The Society of Publication Designers, AIGA, The Type Directors Club, Communication Arts magazine, Print Magazine and Folio.
WSJ wins three Loebs; Bloomberg and NYTimes win two
by Chris Roush
The first two Loeb Awards — and three of the first four — announced Tuesday night went to Dow Jones & Co. news operations.
Julia Angwin, Emily Steel, Scott Thurm, Christina Tsuei, Paul Antonson, Jill Kirschenbaum and Jovi Juan of The Wall Street Journal received the Loeb Award for “What They Know” in the online enterprise category.
Kara Swisher for “Liveblogging Yahoo Earnings Calls in 2010 (They’re Funny!)” at All Things Digital won in the blogging category.
The Loebs, considered the most prestigious award in business journalism, are being presented Tuesday night at a dinner in New York. A tribute to former CNBC anchor Mark Haines, who died suddenly earlier this year, was shown during the ceremony.
Here are the rest of the winners, given more or less in chronological order of when they were announced during the night:
Sebastian Mallaby for “More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite” published by The Penguin Press won in the business book category.
In the breaking news category, Tom Lauricella, Peter A. McKay, Scott Patterson, Jenny Strasburg, Robin Sidel, Carolyn Cui and Mary Pilon of The Journal won for “Flash Crash.”
In the news service category, the winner is David Evans for “Profiting From Fallen Soldiers” in Bloomberg News. Bloomberg’s Daniel Golden, John Hechinger and John Lauerman also won in the beat reporting category for “Education Inc.”
In the medium and small newspaper category, there are two winners — Chris Serres and Glenn Howatt of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for “Hounded — Debtors and the New Breed of Collectors” and Michael J. Berens of the Seattle Times for “Seniors for Sale.”
In the magazine category, the winners are Amanda Bennett and Charles R. Babcock in Bloomberg Businessweek for “End-of-Life Warning at $618,616 Makes Me Wonder Was It Worth It,” a moving piece about the death of Bennett’s husband.
Ron Lieber of the New York Times won in the personal finance category for “Student Debt.” Paul Krugman, also from the Times, won in the commentary category for various columns.
CNBC‘s Mitch Weitzner, Scott Cohn, Jeff Pohlman, Emily Bodenberg and Steven Banton won in the television enterprise category for “Remington Under Fire: A CNBC Investigation.”
In the explanatory category, the winners are David Nicklaus and Tim Logan for “Edifice Complex” in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
And the final winner of the evening, in the large newspaper category, is Ben Casselman, Russell Gold, Douglas A. Blackmon, Vanessa O’Connell, Alexandra Berzon and Ana Campoy for “Deep Trouble” in The Journal.
Florida biz columnist resigns to become mayor’s PR director
by Chris Roush
The business columnist at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Fla., has resigned to become the communications director of the mayor-elect of the city.
Before entering journalism, Harding was a commercial lender at IronStone Bank, and an assistant vice president at AmSouth Bank and SouthTrust Bank.
Harding is a graduate of Southern Illinois University
The news was reported Thursday by Mike Marino of the Times-Union.