Monthly Archives: November 2011
Sterngold joins SmartMoney magazine
by Chris Roush
TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
SmartMoney magazine editor Jonathan Dahl made the following staff announcement on Wednesday afternoon:
I’m happy to announce that James Sterngold, an award-winning former New York Times reporter, will be joining SmartMoney as a senior writer, starting Dec. 5. He’ll be focusing on investigative stories and other features, as part of our continuing effort to offer more in-depth, sophisticated personal-finance stories. He will also help out on some editing, sharing his reporting knowledge and mentoring skills on team projects.
Jim comes uniquely qualified for these tasks, described by one longtime Journal editor as a “byline you feared.” He spent 18 years at The New York Times, serving as the paper’s lead Wall Street reporter, and later its Tokyo Bureau Chief, before heading to Los Angeles to cover business, culture, and national affairs. There, Jim earned a bevy of reporting awards and contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the events of 9/11. After the Times, Jim became national affairs correspondent and Los Angeles bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle, before finally coming to his senses and returning to New York.
Until recently, Jim was firing up the presses at Bloomberg News/Businessweek, where he served as a roving feature writer, covering all things financial. His piece on the compensation of former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld (“Who Cares About Another $200 million?”) won a prize from the Foreign Press Association. And along the way, Jim, a dad of two and married to Mireya Navarro of The New York Times, wrote a well-received book on one of America’s most storied and now-defunct brokerage houses, E. F. Hutton.
He will report to Cliff Leaf. Please join me in welcoming him to the SmartMoney team.
Biz journalist leaves National Journal after inappropriate remark
by Chris Roush
Ben Smith of Politico reports that business journalist Ed Andrews left the National Journal after making an inappropriate sexual remark to a colleague, and he has an e-mail that Andrews sent out to friends confirming the incident.
Smith writes, “Sources familiar with the situation told POLITICO that Andrews – best known for writing a book about his misadventures during the subprime mortgage crisis — was let go for a sexually inappropriate comment he allegedly made to a younger female staff member. The sources said he was escorted out of the National Journal’s offices.
“National Journal communications director Taylor West confirmed last week that Andrews was no longer at NJ; she declined to comment further.
“Asked to explain his departure from the Journal that day, Andrews emailed, ‘I have had a wonderful run at National Journal, but we simply had disagreements and decided to part ways.’ He did not respond to a question about the details of the incident.”
Read more here, including the e-mail that Andrews sent about the remark.
A new business news term?
by Chris Roush
TheStreet.com‘s top headline for the unified central bank action taken Wednesday morning coins a new word.
Is this something that your media organization would use as well?
SABEW’s Best in Business contest starts Thursday
by Chris Roush
The Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ 17th annual Best in Business Awards Competition — honoring the nation’s best business journalism of 2011 — opens just after midnight Thursday.
The contest opens at 12:01 a.m. Thursday Dec. 1, more than a month earlier than last year. The earlier entry period gives SABEW members — the only journalists eligible for the contest — time to get their entries out of the way before the traditional contest “season” begins in January.
Early birds who file before 8 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, Jan. 6, 2012, get a discounted rate.
The final deadline for submissions to this year’s Best in Business with 8 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012. And if that sounds earlier than usual, that’s because it is.
SABEW set this date to ensure the contest is finished in time for awards ceremonies March 17, 2012, at SABEW’s 49th annual spring conference in Indianapolis, Ind. Unlike in past years, there will be no extensions.
A SABEW representative will be in prompt contact with entrants who send questions to bib@sabew.org..
SABEW memberships must be paid and current at the time entries are filed. If you’d like to inquire about your membership status, write to SABEW membership coordinator Mark Scarp at scarp@sabew.org.
“Shame on you” a popular phrase in Forbes letters
by Chris Roush
Jim Romenesko got to the bottom of the matter as to what phrases appear most often in letters to the editor to Forbes magazine.
Romenesko writes, “A few months ago, someone asked on Quora: ‘Why must at least one letter to the editor in every magazine contain the word kudos?’
“Forbes managing editor Bruce Upbin replied:
I don’t think it is a must. The most frequently appearing phrases in our letters from readers are:
“Shame on you”
“I expected more from you”
“We expect this error/assertion/omission/confusion to be corrected ASAP”
“I’ve been a subscriber for XX years…until now”
“What a shoddy piece of work that article was”but kudos to you for asking the question.
Read more here.
CNBC’s Drury on what makes good biz TV
by Chris Roush
Chris Ariens of MediaBistro.com interviewed CNBC anchor Amanda Drury about her job.
Bloomberg Businessweek strikes deal with Hachette for e-books
by Chris Roush
Hachette Book Group is partnering with Bloomberg Businessweek on e-singles that will illuminate key moments in the world of business, drawing on content from the magazine, reports Laura Hazard Owen of PaidContent.org. The first one is about Steve Jobs.
Owen writes, “The Steve Jobs e-book is $3.99 and available now at a variety of etailers, including Kindle, Nook and Apple’s iBookstore. Its content is from Bloomberg Businessweek’s October 10 Steve Jobs tribute issue.
“The alliance between Hachette and Businessweek is notable because many media outlets — including the Los Angeles Times, Guardian and Hearst — have chosen to publish e-books that consist of repurposed content directly, rather than partnering with book publishers. Random House has partnered with RealClearPolitics and Politico to publish e-books about the 2012 election, but those will consist of new content.
“Book publishers themselves are also releasing e-singles directly — see recent offerings from Penguin, Rodale, Scholastic, Open Road and Princeton University Press.
“It remains unclear how these books are selling, with most publishers saying it’s too early to tell or that they’re still experimenting with selling content in the form.”
Read more here.
FT expects subscriptions, newsstand revenue to surpass ad revenue
by Chris Roush
The Financial Times expects its print advertising revenues to be overtaken by subscription and content sales for the first time this year, reports Georgina Prodhan of Reuters.
Prodhan writes, “The FT, the only unit of British publishing group Pearson with significant exposure to advertising, has been at the forefront of making consumers pay for news on the Web, and now makes almost 30 percent of its revenues online.
“‘It’s obviously a rather challenging time for print advertising so these engines of digital subscriptions and content are essential and valuable,’ Chief Executive John Ridding said on Monday.
“‘We think this year our content revenues should be pretty much the equivalent, maybe even exceed, print advertising revenues for the first time ever,’ he told the London leg of the Reuters Global Media Summit.
“The Financial Times, with its specialist business news and elite readership, is one of the few news providers to have succeeded in developing a successful online business behind a paywall. Digital subscriptions are now its main growth driver.”
Read more here.
Ex-WSJer Eavis to join NYT
by Chris Roush
TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Peter Eavis, who was with The Wall Street Journal from January 2008 until September 2010, is joining the business desk of The New York Times.
An email announcement from Times business editor Larry Ingrassia and Dealbook.com editor at large Andrew Ross Sorkin states:
We are delighted to announce that Peter Eavis will be joining The Times to cover a variety of finance and markets issues for DealBook and BusinessDay.
We have long been fans of his work at TheStreet.com, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. Peter brings a probing eye as he explores the corporate finance and markets. At TheStreet, Peter won a Loeb Award for commentary in 2005 for articles spelling out the accounting troubles at Fannie Mae before they were on regulators’ radar screen.
More recently, writing the Heard on the Street for The Journal, he was among the first to raise red flags about European sovereign debt.
Pieces like these have given Peter a great reputation among colleagues, competitors and subjects as an insightful journalist with savvy reporting and analytical skills. He also has a reputation for being an energetic team player who is eager to share ideas and knowledge. We believe he can play an important role in elevating our coverage of finance and in helping our reporting on the markets at such a tumultuous time.
Peter joins the large tribe of NYT journalists who were born in Canada. Peter, though, is a British national and a graduate of Leeds University. He has also lived in the Caribbean, Indonesia, Prague and Ames, Iowa. For two and a half years, Peter left journalism to pastor a church on the Upper West Side. He is an avid soccer player, and plays for Geezers F.C., an Upper West Side team that typically kicks off at dawn in Riverside Park. He is also a passionate, twice-published photographer, and refuses to use anything but film. Peter lives on the Upper West Side, with his wife, Phoebe Louis Dreyfus, two children, 13 and 7, one dog, two cats and two guinea pigs.
Please welcome Peter when he joins us in the new year.
Why energy coverage sucks
by Chris Roush
Chris Nelder, a columnist at SmartPlanet.com, writes about the problems he sees when journalists cover energy and provides some suggestions when reading such coverage.
They include:
2. Discount the sources. If the cited authority represents the oil and gas industry, you should view their forecasts as propaganda, not truth. Particularly when the authority is from an OPEC producer. OPEC (like the IEA) is a fundamentally political organization, and everything they say in public has a political calculus behind it. For example, I read the unconventional oil optimism expressed by the Saudi official cited at the top of this piece as their way of jawboning down peak oil fears, and throwing analysts off the scent of a trail which leads to serious questions about whether Aramco can increase spare production capacity, and whether the world’s most productive oil field, Ghawar, has indeed gone into decline.
3. Do the math. If the numbers cited don’t add up, then you would be wise to question the validity of what you’re reading. Most of the time it’s simple arithmetic you can do in your head. More ambitious readers will want to bust out a spreadsheet and have a go at the details.
4. Look for context. If the article only talks about resources or reserves, and doesn’t mention production rates, you can safely ignore it. Yes, America may have 1.5 trillion barrels of oil shale (not shale oil, which again is an entirely different thing), but right now we’re producing exactly zero barrels of it, and for good reason: it’s a highly marginal source of hydrocarbons, and too expensive to produce with today’s technology. Remember this: Only flow rates matter, not how much is in the ground.
Read more here.