Talking Biz
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.
BuzzFeed launches business news section
by Chris Roush
The overhaul of Wired
by Chris Roush
Lauren Indvik of Mashable writes about the complete overhaul of Wired magazine, which rolled out its redesign with the June issue.
Indvik writes, “There was something about the previous version of Wired — the bright colors, bold fonts, perhaps the splashy photos and graphics — that made it feel distinctly like a magazine about science and technology for men. Not so with the new edition of Wired, which feels more like Wired meets T: The New York Times Style Magazine meets The New Yorker. With its modern, almost muted aesthetic, it feels more like a lifestyle magazine — and a rather sophisticated, thoughtful one at that.
“Wired‘s redesign began with an idea and a problem to solve, Claudia de Almeida, Wired‘s new deputy design director, recalled in a phone conversation with Mashable last week. ‘[We asked ourselves] what is technology, what kind of role does it play in our lives today, and how can that be communicated on the pages of Wired that people can connect to and that feels current?’
“‘From my point of view, technology is not only your computer on your desk anymore, it’s part of your life. It made sense to me to have a design that felt more accessible, that didn’t make you feel all the time that you’re just reading a tech magazine,’ de Almeida said. ‘It’s not only a magazine about technology, [it's] also a magazine about people who make technology happen.’
“De Almeida said those views are communicated in the designs themselves. She pointed out the multidimensionality of several of the fonts. The ‘l’ in Alpha, a section about new ideas and early movers, also looks like the number 1. The thin lines that appear in that section are repeated in Gadget Lab, and the squares in the Alpha logo also appear in the cubist font of Ultra, a section centered on entertainment. De Almeida said she wanted a design that made the magazine appeal to both sexes, and not just to men.”
Read more here.
FT launches Spanish-language service for Latin America
by Chris Roush
The Financial Times launched Tuesday a new service in Latin America providing FT news and analysis translated into Spanish.
Available through the FT Syndication service, which offers media organizations the right to republish FT content, subscribers will receive 10 articles per week covering international trends and developments relevant to Latin America.
The service will include two articles a day in Spanish from Monday to Friday, available through print or digital channels. Content will include an opinion piece written by an FT columnist and a news story from the world news, global economy or companies section.
“The demand for global journalism in Latin America is increasing and the region’s companies are looking for internationally-focused news to help with global negotiations and decision-making,” said FT B2B Managing Director Caspar de Bono in a statement. “By providing relevant news in the local language, this service helps media organizations complement their own editorial with compelling FT content. It’s a cost-effective way to increase readership, gain a competitive edge and fulfill the demand for trusted global intelligence using the FT’s world class news and analysis.”
The FT launched a dedicated mobile app in Latin America last year and has seen strong growth in the region.
Read more here.
Knowing how not to get in trouble
by Chris Roush
Latoya West of The Journal News in Westchester County, N.Y., interviewed Fox Business Network reporter Charles Gasparino about his career.
Here is an excerpt:
Q: What inspired you to pursue a career in journalism?
A: It certainly wasn’t the money. My parents hated the fact that I wanted to go into journalism for both the low pay and particularly because my father hated reporters for bringing down Nixon (he was one of those “silent majority” types who wasn’t so silent). I just liked the fact that I could write something and get a reaction from lots of people. I did this first by sports-writing at the old North County News, then covering local government for various papers in northern Westchester.
Q: Do you remember the first big story you broke in Westchester?
A: I was at the Peekskill Herald and it was a story about how the city basically was in violation of county law by the way the police department was run. It was on the radio and everyone in government read it. It was also a little scary because it was being debated as I was in the meeting, but that what makes this job worthwhile.
Q: Did your experience working for small papers help shape the journalist you are now?
A: Definitely, because I paid my dues. Kids come out of college wanting to go right into big-time journalism and opine about national events. That’s fine except they really haven’t worked their way up through the ranks, and made their mistakes at smaller places where you can learn from your mistakes. I got to the WSJ in 1995 and I was a fairly experienced reporter. I knew how not to get in trouble and how to handle the pressures of working in big-time journalism because I spent so many years at smaller papers. The kids I saw who made the jump from college to the WSJ didn’t have that same background and they often ended up washing out or getting tired of the pressures and grind of the job.
Read more here.
