Stories by Chris Roush
Bloomberg, Citi launch chat service for exchange traders
by Chris Roush
Bloomberg L.P. Thursday unveiled a new chat service for foreign-exchange traders across various banks, developed in collaboration with Citigroup, reports William Launder of The Wall Street Journal.
Launder writes, “The product is part of a broader effort by banks to take direct control of employee-communications services, at a time when the security of chat platforms has been called into question and the financial industry is looking to reduce its technology costs.
“The chat service, called IB Dealing, allows users to negotiate, make and report trades on a centralized platform. Foreign-exchange traders at more than 100 banks already have been testing the service. Thursday’s announcement represents its formal unveiling.
“Citi worked with Bloomberg to develop the product, which aims to cut operating costs by making banks less dependent on multiple outside communication services.
“The unveiling comes just a week after The Wall Street Journal reported that Citi was moving more of its internal group-chat functions away from Bloomberg to a proprietary internal-messaging service called CitiFXWire.”
Read more here.
Bloomberg News hires Boston Globe’s ME
by Chris Roush
Caleb Solomon will join Bloomberg News as an editor at large for Top News, beginning Monday, June 17, editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler announced Thursday.
Solomon joins Bloomberg News from The Boston Globe, where he has served as managing editor/digital since March 2013. Previously, Solomon was The Globe’s managing editor, where he acted as the newsroom’s chief operating officer and led the team that redesigned the paper. He also headed the organization’s video efforts and helped create BostonGlobe.com. He came to The Globe in 2003 as business editor and became deputy managing editor in 2007.
Solomon began his career at The Wall Street Journal and held several roles with the publication, including stints in New York, Houston, Boston and Brussels.
Solomon spent nearly two years in Brussels for The Wall Street Journal Europe, first as the networking editor overseeing a section devoted to technology, media, marketing and management. He was named page one editor and assistant managing editor of the Journal Europe in November 2001.
Prior to that, Solomon spent almost four years as editor of The Wall Street Journal/New England, a weekly section he launched devoted to breaking regional news. He previously headed Texas Journal, the regional section in Texas for The Wall Street Journal.
Solomon served for eight years as a Journal reporter in Houston, concentrating on the oil industry. Before that, he was a copy editor for The Journal in New York. For several years he also wrote radio and TV copy for various broadcast services of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Journal. He earned his master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
He will report to Bloomberg News executive editor Marty Schenker.
How business news fits in at BuzzFeed
by Chris Roush
Laura Shin of SmartPlanet.com writes about how business news will fit into BuzzFeed’s operation.
Shin writes, “Section editor, Peter Lauria, who was hired from Reuters and spent five years at the New York Post leading media, tech and entertainment coverage, says, ‘Nobody is saying that BuzzFeed is going to replace The Wall Street Journal as an investor’s first business read of the day.’ But he does think that bringing business personalities or data to life in fun ways will attract the LinkedIn, Wall Street and executive crowd as well as traditional BuzzFeed readers.
“He describes the main business topics BuzzFeed Business will cover — Wall Street, media/entertainment, consumer technology, specialty retail — as ‘sexy and inherently shareable.’ Lauria notes: ‘There’s an appetite among people in the business community to not always be taken so seriously and be bland, boring suit-and-tie-wearing people that have no personalities.’
“Dean Starkman, editor of Columbia Journalism Review’s business section, says the strategy is a good one. ‘The reason this makes sense is that it’s not about creating content for a BuzzFeed reader. What they’re really targeting is LinkedIn…. And they’ll do it according to their formula — being as sensational and attention-grabbing as possible. There’s nothing inherently serious about business news that you can’t play with.’
“Before launching the section, Smith told The Wall Street Journal he wanted to ‘bring some of the DNA of a great tabloid business section’ to the site. Lauria says this means several things, beginning with having a certain attitude or point of view.”
Read more here.
Bloomberg econ reporter to become the Perfect Anecdote
by Chris Roush
Alex Kowalski, an economics reporter for Bloomberg News in Washington, is leaving the wire service for graduate school in urban planning at Cal-Berkeley.
“I will focus on housing, community and economic development, topics that increasingly commanded my interests as I wrote more and more about the U.S. economy,” wrote Kowalski in an email to Talking Biz News.
“What happens next? I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t mind, for a change, producing a research paper or a policy briefing instead of digesting one.”
He started at Bloomberg in 2010 upon his graduation from UNC-Chapel Hill. While at UNC-CH, he was a columnist and a city desk reporter for The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper, and was a summer intern at Bloomberg and at Congressional Quarterly. He was also on the men’s crew team at UNC.
One of his colleagues sent out the following announcement in a bit of economic reporter humor:
Please join us to bid farewell to Alex Kowalski, who is leaving Bloomberg to become the Perfect Anecdote.
Alex will be lowering the participation rate, taking on student debt, renting instead of buying, and avoiding retail outlets (unless he’s underemployed at one of them for less than 35 hours a week and not collecting health benefits).
In the process, he’ll give a boost to Comfort, especially in the critical 18- to 34-year-old bracket, because he’ll be doing what he’s been wanting to do for a long time: get his graduate degree.
WSJ names editor for institutional news and data
by Chris Roush
Wall Street Journal managing editor Gerard Baker sent out the following staff promotion on Wednesday:
I’m delighted to announce that Dave Pettit is appointed Editor, Institutional News and Data.
In this newly created role, Dave will oversee the transition of our newswires platform to the digital age — a change that is critical to the success of the entire newsroom. Drawing on the strength of an integrated news organization, Dave will lead the launch of several specialized coverage areas, or “Dominants”, as well as the development of a digital news service, provisionally branded “DJX”. In addition, Dave will continue his leading role in the newsroom integration project.
Dave has broad experience in real-time and digital journalism. He was part of the team that launched WSJ.com and eventually became the site’s deputy managing editor. At the Online Journal, he directed overall news coverage, developed multimedia and oversaw the site’s most far-reaching redesign so far, in 2008. Following his tenure at WSJ.com, Dave helped launch new products for the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, including market data and Dow Jones FX Trader. He worked as an editor and reporter for Dow Jones Newswires in New York from 1989-1995.
He will report to Almar Latour.
Reuters vs. Bloomberg for chat functions
by Chris Roush
Simone Foxman of Quartz writes about how Reuters also offers a chat function to its customers that is similar to the one that Bloomberg offers on its terminals.
Foxman writes, “Alternatives to Bloomberg chat are already out there, the most prominent offered by Thomson Reuters itself since 2002. In fact, according to a source, Thomson Reuters Messenger has long been part of the media giant’s plans to win back Wall Street from Bloomberg—well before the Bloomberg snooping scandal.
“‘They know that they can’t match the data side,’ said the source, who had access to data on Reuters’ Messenger but spoke to Quartz on condition of anonymity. ‘But Reuters is much stronger in Europe and Asia, where the Bloomberg terminal hasn’t had as much penetration. Reuters Messenger is really popular there.’ The existing technology is expected to serve as a jumping-off point for Open Federated Chat; the main difference seems to be that the new service will have the backing of Markit and major banks.
“Thomson Reuters gives Messenger to Wall Street users free of charge, both as a standalone platform that synchronizes with chat networks like AOL and Yahoo, and as part of Reuters’ Eikon terminal interface. It offers more features than Bloomberg’s chat service, particularly in its chat rooms. The most recent of these, launched in January of this year, was the Global Markets Forum, which is run by a handful of Reuters editorial staff. Like the existing Global Oil Forum and Global Ags Forum, it encourages users to banter about the markets. Big-name economists and investors like Société Générale’s Kit Juckes and HSBC’s Steven Major are invited on to stimulate the discussion. Other chat rooms are locked to journalists.”
Read more here.
When the IRS obtained a biz reporter’s phone records
by Chris Roush
Gregory Millman of The Wall Street Journal writes about the time that the Internal Revenue Service secretly obtained his phone records.
Millman writes, “My first-hand experience of this came when agents of the Secret Service (then part of the Treasury Department, now part of the Department of Homeland Security) appeared at my door in 1991. I was a freelance journalist at the time, and had written a story about a tax issue for a now-defunct magazine called ‘Corporate Finance.’ Two agents in suits knocked on my back door one autumn day as the children were sitting down to lunch, came in and urged me to identify my sources for the story, in which I had cited an Internal Revenue Service memo. When I refused to identify anyone, the agents told me I could wind up spending five years in prison. I didn’t know at the time that they already had a record of every phone call I had made.
“At the request of the IRS, my telephone company had already turned over my phone records covering an unspecified period, and agents had been at work identifying calls to numbers they thought might be leads. They seem to have thought my source was in the Washington-Maryland area, because after finding numbers I had called in that area they went after the records of calls made from those numbers, as holders of those numbers later told me. That’s how they happened to scoop up the phone records of a home builder, a trade association of corporate finance officers, an old friend who happened to live in Washington, D.C., and the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which supports investigative journalism and which I had called to discuss a fellowship. None of these people or organizations had anything to do with the story at issue, and none learned until long afterward that IRS investigators had been secretly riffling through records of all their phone calls.
“I never received any official notice about that either. My attorney only learned of it accidentally. In what may be another good example of government waste and duplication, several months after the IRS had started going through the phone records, the Department of Justice launched its own investigation. In keeping with the DOJ’s policy, in mid-January of 1992 I got a notice that it wanted my records. We went to court to fight, lost, and the records were in the hands of the prosecutors by the end of the month. In the course of our fight, my attorney learned from my phone company that it had already turned the records over to the IRS months before.”
Read more here.
Bloomberg Businessweek starts new ad campaign
by Chris Roush
Todd Wasserman of Mashable writes that Bloomberg Businessweek is targeting twentysomethings living at home for a campaign that aims to gently nudge them out of their parents’ basements by offering — what else? — a subscription to the magazine.
Wasserman writes, “The title launched the website bbwgetsyouahead.com, which houses e-giftcards that parents and friends can send to Gen Y-ers still living at home. One card from the parents reads, ‘Our American dream is for you to move out.’ A friend’s card offers the following inspiring message: ‘**Spoiler Alert** You end up middle-aged and single.’ In addition to launching the site, Bloomberg Businessweek will also run an online campaign.
“Physical versions of these cards will also be available at the stationery chain Papyrus. The cards are designed to be sent with 12 free issues of Bloomberg Businessweek, either in print or on the iPad.
“Bloomberg Businessweek, which Michael Bloomberg purchased and reconstituted in 2009, claims 980,000 global subscribers. A representative could not say how many of those readers are in its campaign target group — 18 to 31 years old and living at home — but acknowledged that it’s a ‘growing demo.’ The campaign ‘is not too subtle, and that’s what we liked about it,’ the representative said.
“That said, Bloomberg Businessweek may not necessarily be the magazine you’d normally think to give a young person hitting the job market. It doesn’t include any interviewing tips, and boasts little prescriptive advice.”
Read more here.
Blogging and stock price manipulation
by Chris Roush
Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review writes about how The Motley Fool faced attempts to manipulate some of its writers into posting items about a questionable penny stock.
Chittum writes, “Richards reports the site ‘has banned four bloggers because they submitted suspiciously glowing posts on Goff.’ He also notes that SeekingAlpha, a competitor stock-blogging site, published four positive Goff posts during the pump.
“And hats off to the blogger, whom Motley Fool doesn’t name, for having the integrity to turn down the bribe. Because others didn’t think anything of it. Here’s one of the banned Motley Fool bloggers:
When we questioned the nature of his Goff post, he said it wasn’t a big deal: ‘I am on a regular basis offered compensation to write about multiple firms.’
“The obvious question here is: How prevalent is corrupt user-generated content like this on the financial blogs? And since the answer to that question is unknowable, how can you trust any of it? Richards reports that Motley Fool has ‘strict rules against publishing stories on micro-cap companies with limited liquidity and/or low share prices to avoid manipulation of stock price, intentional or not,’ but it clearly didn’t work here, at least until it was too late.
“But give Motley Fool a lot of credit here for simply doing the story, much less diving into it. Richards doesn’t shy away from reporting how his site’s own blogging platform got abused in the matter. It would have been much easier for Motley Fool to let this story slide.”
Read more here.
