Tag Archives: Blogging
Oregonian starts blog allowing businesses to post “news”
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The Oregonian has revamped its online business news site, including starting a blog that allows businesses to post their own news.
Therese Bottomly, managing editor of readership and standards, writes, “Newly redesigned, the business news website at oregonlive.com/business more boldly displays stories, videos and photos. It remains the home for updated business news stories, The Oregonian’s subject-specific blogs — Silicon Forest, Complaint Desk, Window Shop and It’s Only Money (on hiatus for a few weeks) — and calendar listings.
“The website also adds Business Watch, a public blog. A free service, the blog provides company leaders a way to show off the work they do, through new product information, personnel moves and business events. There’s already one entry to check out.”
Read more here.
FBI seeks documents from Gawker about story on iPad leak
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation has asked Gawker Media to retain all the documents it has on a story its Valleywag site posted earlier this week about a security leak on iPads through AT&T that exposed personal information for thousands of users.
Shira Ovide of The Wall Street Journal reports, “The post from Wednesday has been clicked on 850,000 times so far, Mr. Stern said. Gawker.com on Wednesday had about 2.8 million page views, about 75% more than total page views for a typical weekday, according to Mr. Stern.
“Mr. Stern said he and Valleywag editor Ryan Tate spent all night Tuesday verifying the data file from a group of computer experts that calls itself Goatse Security, which had identified the AT&T breach and sought to publicize it.
“Gawker verified the information and only posted partial email addresses. Mr. Stern said it didn’t want to disclose potentially sensitive email addresses or the unique iPad ID numbers.
“Mr. Stern and Goatse Security said Gawker Media didn’t compensate the group for the scoop.”
Read more here.
Kouwe loses second job
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Zachery Kouwe, the New York Times business reporter who resigned after being accused of plagiarism, has been let go from a freelance business reporting job at Dealbreaker.com.
Felix Salmon writes, “I spoke to Matt Creamer, the executive editor of Breaking Media, Dealbreaker’s parent. He sent me this statement:
Zachery Kouwe was a freelance contributor on Dealbreaker for just over two months. We ended the relationship on Thursday after it came to our attention that he wrote emails to Dealbreaker commenters referencing their workplaces. Our readers and commenters trust us with personal information and we take that responsibility very seriously. Anyone who registers on our sites should feel confident their information is secure.
“For the backstory, read the comments to this blog entry — the last one that Kouwe posted on the site. One anonymous commenter — and Dealbreaker prizes its commenters’ anonymity greatly — wrote that ‘Kouwe e-mailed me the other day to tell me he ‘knew’ where I worked’, and later posted a screenshot of the emails in question. It seems that Kouwe obtained the commenter’s email address — presumably through his privileged access to the commenter login system — and then emailed the commenter to tell him exactly where he worked. And this didn’t only happen once, as a different commenter explained:
It crosses a line when Zach sends unsolicited emails to posters (which I can bear witness too although in my instance it was entirely harmless). Many of us work at shops where unapproved communication with media outlets quickly leads to termination.
“Dealbreaker’s editor, Bess Levin, replied:
What happened is NOT condoned by Dealbreaker and you can rest assured we’ve taken the necessary steps to ensure it will not be happening again.”
Read more here.
NYTimes to expand Dealbook operations
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The New York Times plans to hire up to 12 additional staffers for its popular Dealbook blog run by business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, writes Russell Adams of The Wall Street Journal.
Adams writes, “The people said New York Times Co. management has approved the addition of about a dozen people to the existing staff of eight at DealBook, a four-year-old financial-news blog edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times’s chief mergers and acquisitions reporter.
“Launched in the spring of 2006, DealBook has become one of the most popular destinations on nytimes.com but it’s also been the subject of controversy.
“In February, former DealBook writer Zachery Kouwe resigned after the Times uncovered multiple instances of plagiarism. The discovery followed a letter from The Wall Street Journal to the Times calling attention to similarities between a Feb. 5 article on the Journal’s Web site and articles that later appeared in the online and print editions of the Times.
“DealBook’s expansion bucks a trend at the Times and at most other news organizations, which have been slashing costs to help offset declining revenues. Late last year, Times Co. shed 100 jobs in the flagship paper’s 1,150-person newsroom.”
Read more here.
BailoutSleuth.com expands reporting staff
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BailoutSleuth.com, a nonprofit investigative journalism site funded by entrepreneur Mark Cuban, has expanded its reporting staff to keep closer tabs on TARP and financial regulators, and to dig more deeply into the causes and effects of the crisis.
In addition to editor Chris Carey, BailoutSleuth’s team now comprises three full-time writers and a consultant. The staff includes veteran reporter Gary Cohn, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Baltimore Sun and more recently was the recipient of a 2009 Barlett & Steele Award for investigative business journalism. Cohn will pursue long-term projects, and is currently working on his first major BailoutSleuth.com investigation.
Ryan Holeywell is BailoutSleuth’s correspondent in Washington, D.C. Holeywell previously worked as a government reporter for The Monitor in McAllen, Texas. Kevin O’Connor, an historian and former college professor, mines Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other government documents for details on TARP repayments, bank finances and executive compensation for the site.
In addition to its writing team, BailoutSleuth has retained Pulitzer Prize-winner Russell Carollo as a consultant to seek government documents and databases through Freedom of Information Act requests and analyze data.
“I’m thrilled with the team we’ve assembled and excited about the bigger projects we can pursue,” said Carey, who has edited the site since its inception in October 2008, in astatement. “This is the ultimate follow-the-money story. There’s still hundreds of billions of TARP dollars out there, and tens of billions in assets that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has absorbed from failed banks.’’
FT begins putting blogs behind paywall
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Felix Salmon of Reuters reports that The Financial Times has begun puttings some of its blogs behind a paywall.
Salmon writes, “The post has received three comments so far, all of which are from subscribers to the print newspaper who say that they will henceforth no longer read the blog.
“The move makes sense in a kind of tyranny-of-consistency way: the FT.com site believes that paywalls are the way to go, Money Supply is on the FT.com site, therefore Money Supply must be behind the paywall. But beyond that, it’s silly.
“For one thing, the best reason for newspapers to put a paywall around their website is to support the circulation of the print product, where readers are much more lucrative in terms of both subscription and advertising revenue. Newspapers with free websites fear that their print readers will desert the newspaper for the online product, and they put up paywalls to make that decision less attractive.”
Read more here.
Was iPad breach story ignored by mainstream business media?
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Taylor Buley of Forbes reports that the iPad hacking breach via AT&T story broken Wednesday by Ryan Tate at Valleywag was offered first to mainstream business media such as Reuters and the San Francisco Chronicle, but they ignored the story.
Buley writes, “According to ‘Weev,’ a well known Internet ‘activist’ who we likened to Shakespeare’s Puck after a baffling Amazon.com security incident last year, the ‘Goatse’ security group alerted various members of the mainstream press via email before granting Gawker’s Tate an exclusive on the data.
“‘i disclosed this to other press organizations first (ones who had ipad users affected by the breach, lol) and was ignored,’ writes Weev in an email. ‘gawker found out and ran with it immediately.’
“To prove it, Weev sent Forbes copies of emails sent to press at Reuters, News Corp, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle. The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed, but each has a timestamp dating back to Sunday night.
“One of the purported emails is included at the bottom of this post. For privacy, some information has been redacted but it was addressed to 11 Reuters email addresses, including editor@reuters.com and reuters@reuters.com.”
Read more here. Robert MacMillan, a Reuters reporter and editor, Tweets Wednesday night that he does not recognize any of the e-mail addresses at Reuters.
Demand Media to produce online biz news content for San Fran paper
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Erik Sherman of BNet is reporting that Demand Media has struck a deal with Hearst Newspapers to produce content for some of its newspapers, including real estate and small business news content for the Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Earlier this year, the Chronicle struck a deal with Bloomberg for the wire service to provide some of its business news content.
Sherman writes, “Demand sent an email to its Demand Studios contributors, explaining the upcoming deal and asking them to keep the names the two papers and the web sites, Chron.com and SFGate.com, confidential until it formally revealed the details. Here’s a section of the email:
We have entered into a partnership with Hearst Newspapers to produce articles for two of their premium publications, San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle. Specifically, we are creating articles and videos for the Real Estate section of SFGate.com and the Small Business section of Chron.com.
We’re currently accepting applications for writers and editors. These articles come at a higher fee and your byline will be featured on these premium publications. Qualified applicants will not only be topical experts in their field, but also have relevant writing or editing experience in the subject. To apply, please email [email address omitted] with the subject line “Real Estate” or “Small Business.” Include a summary of your experience and attach any relevant clips. All interested CEs, please cc your copy chief with your application, and unfortunately we cannot consider your application if you have not yet had a review.
We are not currently able to disclose the partners publically and we ask that you keep their names confidential until further notice.
Read more here.
Loebs and blogging don't mix
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Reuters blogger Felix Salmon, who was a Loeb Award judge this year, argues that the Pulitzer Prizes of business journalism still haven’t figured out blogging, and bloggers still haven’t figured out the Loebs.
Salmon writes, “Reuters nominated me for the Online Commentary and Blogging category and I didn’t make the final four. And this is the point at which according to convention I should talk about how wonderful the nominees are and how any of them will make a worthy winner. But I won’t, because this award is broken — and indeed is even more broken than I had thought it would be when I first wrote about it in November.
“To understand why, put yourself in the position of an editor who asks a writer to start up a new blog. The writer agrees, but the blog never takes off. The writer insists on filing carefully honed and balanced self-contained news analyses and does so only every few weeks. After a handful of these things, the blog is abandoned as a failure and the writer continues doing the old-fashioned journalism he’s clearly good at.
“Well, a blog just like that is a finalist for the Loeb award. After filing the grand total of 21 blog entries over the course of all of 2009, Jim Prevor, or his editors, picked the best three and submitted them, along with a $100 check; the blog had already been killed by that point and Prevor has posted nothing this year.”
Read more here.
Loebs and blogging don’t mix
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Reuters blogger Felix Salmon, who was a Loeb Award judge this year, argues that the Pulitzer Prizes of business journalism still haven’t figured out blogging, and bloggers still haven’t figured out the Loebs.
“To understand why, put yourself in the position of an editor who asks a writer to start up a new blog. The writer agrees, but the blog never takes off. The writer insists on filing carefully honed and balanced self-contained news analyses and does so only every few weeks. After a handful of these things, the blog is abandoned as a failure and the writer continues doing the old-fashioned journalism he’s clearly good at.
“Well, a blog just like that is a finalist for the Loeb award. After filing the grand total of 21 blog entries over the course of all of 2009, Jim Prevor, or his editors, picked the best three and submitted them, along with a $100 check; the blog had already been killed by that point and Prevor has posted nothing this year.”
Read more here.