Tag Archives: Information
San Diego paper cuts two business reporters amid layoffs
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The San Diego Union-Tribune, which announced layoffs of 40 newsroom staffers on Thursday, has lost two business reporters, notes Eric Wolff of San Diego CityBeat.
They are Penni Crabtree and Jonathan Sidener.
Crabtree covers tourism, retail and consumer issues, while Sidener covers telecommunications, the video game industry and personal technology.
Crabtree is also known for covering questionable pharmaceutical and nutritional health companies.
Sidener, who previously worked at the Arizona Republic, posted a tweet that the layoff takes effect in 60 days.
Read more here.
SF Chronicle losing two more business journalists
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The San Francisco Chronicle, which last month lost two business reporters to buyouts, will lose two more to layoffs, a source at the paper confirmed to Talking Biz News.
They are Internet reporter Verne Kopytoff and senior technology reporter Deborah Gage. Their departure date could not be determined.
Kopytoff covered the Internet for the Chronicle since 2000, including such companies as Yahoo, Google and eBay. He previously worked as a free-lance writer for the New York Times’ Los Angeles bureau. He graduated with a master’s in journalism from University of Southern California and bachelors’ degrees from UC Riverside.
Gage covered computer security, privacy, VCs and trends around Silicon Valley. She has covered technology and business out of Silicon Valley since 1994, most recently for Baseline magazine. She lives in San Jose with her husband, Ron Rainey, and talks to her neighbors when she’s looking for story ideas.
See the full list of layoffs here. Last month, business and labor reporter George Raine and biotechnology reporter Bernadette Tansey took the buyout. Real estate editor Bill Burnett took early retirement.
Nightly Business Report co-anchor Kangas plans to retire at end of 2009
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Paul Kangas, a co-anchor on the PBS show “Nightly Business Report,” plans to retire at the end of the year after three decades in the spot.
The show has quietly begun searching for a successor.
Kangas has been stationed at the show’s Miami headquarters since it began in 1979, making him the longest-running business news anchor in the industry. He has co-anchored the show with New York-based Susie Gharib for the last 12 years.
A former stockbroker, Kangas joined Nightly Business Report when it began as a local program on Miami’s public television station, WPBT2, in 1979.
In addition to delivering the daily market summaries, Kangas conducts each Friday the “Market Monitor” interview with noted market observers. He is known for his fast-paced delivery, sharp wit and encyclopedic knowledge of the financial markets.
In 2003, Kangas’ signature segment, “Stocks in the News,” won a Financial Writers and Editors Award from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University as “best broadcast feature or series useful to investors.”
The media has noticed and praised Kangas for his expertise. The Detroit Free Press has dubbed him “the Walter Cronkite of business broadcasting” and the Village Voice has noted that Kangas is “not content to merely rattle off stocks and prices.” Analysis is a key part of his presentation. Utilizing his extensive contacts on Wall Street, he has earned a reputation for ferreting out the hidden reasons behind stock moves. This prompted TV Guide to praise his “fine stock market coverage” and the Miami Review to comment: “How would brokers answer their clients’ questions about the market without watching Paul Kangas’ summaries?”
Kangas began his career in business broadcasting at the Miami CBS Radio affiliate, WINZ. He was actually a stock broker at the time, but his biggest client owned the station and asked Kangas to do a stock market wrap-up segment. He gave up his work in the stock market when he joined NBR in 1979.
Kangas also previously wrote a syndicated weekly column in Cox Newspapers.
McDonald defines who she is
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Elizabeth MacDonald, the stock market editor at Fox Business Network, talked about the best business journalism to read to learn about the economy and her career with the Woman Around Town site.
Here is an excerpt:
It’s important today that teenagers achieve some level of financial literacy. Who do you think is best able to give them a good financial education?
I hope this doesn’t sound too much like a plug, but Fox Business provides great financial coverage, with solid reporting. I’d also encourage kids to start reading the Fox Business website, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Smart Money, Dow Jones news reports, The Financial Times and The Economist. I started reading the business publications at an early age, picking them up to read and loitering in magazine stores. I didn’t have the money, couldn’t afford them. My parents had 8 children.
You have a flourishing career as a business journalist. Who were your role models? How did they encourage you in your career aspirations?
Flourishing, that’s being kind and generous. I’ve been working since I was 15, starting out in a bank. And, I’ve wanted to be a journalist since I was 10 years old. My role models were my parents and my brothers and sisters. They teased me, fought with me, plus debated me over the dinner table. With the knives, forks, and tempers flaring, it was like lightning bolts were shooting across the table -– a great training ground.
Was there any point in your career when you were discouraged?
Sure. I’ve left many a smoking wreck of career crackups behind me. But so what, who cares? I don’t let anyone define who I am — no boss will ever do that.
Read more here.Â
Claman of Fox Biz prepares for Buffett coverage
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TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
When Fox Business Network anchor Liz Claman made her debut on the network in October 2007, her first interview was with legendary investor Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Claman, a former CNBC anchor, has since interviewed Buffett a number of times on the air and will go to Omaha, Neb., this weekend to provide live coverage of the Berkshire annual meeting. The coverage begins Friday at 2 p.m. and lasts through Monday at 9:30 a.m., when Claman will interview Buffett and Bill Gates for one hour.
Claman talked to Talking Biz News on Tuesday morning about her preparations for that coverage, and how Fox Business is doing. What follows is an edited transcript.
1. What do you do before you go out to Omaha?
This processs literally started the day I got back from Omaha a year ago. It was the first time at Fox Business covering the annual shareholder meeting and we were trhilled with the exclusive we got with Buffett sitting down with Bill Gates.
So we began with our producers discussing what we should do differently this year and then booking guests about six months ago, locking them in. It’s a circus. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. What other annual meeting has the CEO playing a ukelele and a bull walking around? And Berkshire Hathaway, with 70 companies under its umbrella, reflects the broader economy. So when ou put it all together, you get a very interesting amalgam of how the economy is doing. So we tried to book the CEOs of some of those companies.
2. Buffett has become much more accessible to the business media in the past decade. Why do you think that’s the case?
Mr. Buffett chose to conduct his entire business environment from Omaha. People looked at him as some kind of quirky, unattainable individual. And the fact that he was the world’s richest man probably intimidating some people. When I got to CNBC, it had been up and running for nine years, and it was another six or seven years before I was able to land a sit down, hour-long interview. These guys don’t have to talk to the media. They’re not public officials. I studied him, and I think the key that I put into the lock opened the door. Once he saw the way that some of us conducted ourselves, he realized it didn’t hurt. And he’s also a generous man when it comes to intellectual property.
3. Why is Buffett such an important story to business news consumers?
Because he’s been right on so many levels and so many occasions. He is important to anybody with money and anybody who cares about their money. They can find some real value in what he has to say. He has a formula, and that’s equally as important as sticking to the formula. Buffett never abandons his formula, and when it comes to money, people get very emotional, and he doesn’t. You can learn a lot from listening to people like that. Plus he’s very plain spoken and matter of fact. He and his partner Charlie Munger once said, “Wall Street hates us because we’re too simple for them.”
4. What niche is Fox Business filling in the business news world?
We’re the baby on the block, but the baby is flexing a little bit of muscle, I am proud to say. In 18 months, we’ve managed to convince big business leaders that we do matter, and they do come on, everyone from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who will reprise their interview from last year with me on Monday. I got replies to do it again about 7 minutes after I put in the request. Alan Mullaly of Ford has been able to look at us and say, Â ”I want to speak to the Fox Business viewer.”
It wasn’t always like that. We’ve proven to people that we’re serious about journalism, particularly with our FOI requests. That’s what American journalism is supposed to do. We’re supposed to question authority. That goes under Republican presidents and Democratic presidents. We’re not supposed to be a microphone for big business. We’re here for the people.
5. How can Fox Business continue to gain viewers?
We’re not tap dancing to save our lives. We are speaking to our viewers in a new way. We had the Dave Ramsey special last week. I was sucked in completely by the message, which I found fascinating. All it was was a guy on the stage with an important message about tuning out all of the malestrom of the recession and saying you are responsible for your success or failure.
We’ve got to keep doing what we’re doing. I have hedge funds guys that tell me that they have a dedicated monitor to Fox Business. That is thrilling to me. They switched over as they started to hear and read about stories that we have broken. We broke the story back in September about how the SEC was going to curb naked short selling. Forty minutes after we broke it, they put out a press release to announce it. That stuff is important to Wall Street.
We also need not to speak down to viewers. Someone last week used the term “black swan.” You and I may know what it means, but most readers don’t. We have a Fox Translator that explains these terms on the screen, and that brings the people into the fold who have been left out in terms of business news.
6. What would be one thing that you think Fox Business could do to improve?
Viewership. We want more viewers. If there is anything I’d love from CNBC, it’s their viewers. That is a slow process. We have our sister network Fox News to look up to. In a network, in its first couple of months, it was staring up at CNN with bureaus in Beirut and Cairo, and we had a truck driving around New York, looking for news. Five years later, they were dancing on the tables. So we know it can be done, but we have to do it in our own way. We’re a business network. We’re not a punditry network. We’re there to follow money, business, investors and any American who cares about their future and encironment. But we have fun doing it. That’s crucial.
7. What do you see changing in terms of the future of business journalism?
I think business journalists already realize that left unattended, Wall Stret can get itself into major trouble. It’s our role to sound the alarm bells when appropriate, and sound the cheers for small business out there. Business journalism tends to ignore small business, and we’re not doing that. We try to get them on the air every day. That’s where the real void is. Anyone can cover the Dow 30. What about the guy running a business in Tennessee, a clothing store, where he’s now serving bourbon to bring in more customers?
There’s a line that you can find to follow, and we will be a steam train. We’re just laying down our tracks now, to quote Peter Gabriel.
Utah biz magazine shutters
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Grace Leong, a reporter for the Provo Daily Herald in Utah, reports Wednesday that Business Connect magazine, a local business publication with more than 15,000 subscribers statewide, has closed its doors.
Leong writes, “He said the company has been mulling discontinuing Business Connect because of the industrywide slump in advertising revenues in the third and fourth quarter of 2008.
“‘We were best known in Utah for Business Connect, but it accounts for only one-third of our total revenue and ad sales are in a decline now,’ Hill said. ‘We anticipated we were going to have a 25 percent drop in ad revenue for 2009 as we tried to renew advertisers for the year. Had this not happened, we would have continued with Business Connect for some time.’
“Founded in 2003, Lumin, which now has five workers and up to 20 freelance writers, laid off two employees in advertising and production in the past year, as it prepared for the change in its business model.”
Read more here.Â
Dow Jones Newswires hires two new columnists
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Dow Jones Newswires announced Tuesday that it has hired two non-journalists to be columnists.
Paul Sharma, based in London, joins as a telecommunications, media and technology columnist and Donna Childs, based in New York, joins as a financial services columnist.
“The appointments of Paul and Donna are part of our overarching strategy to enhance our editorial teams with top industry talent. We are drawing on the hedge fund and banking communities to deepen Dow Jones’s reporting and commentary on companies, industries and events for investment bankers and corporate advisors,” said Adam Smallman, global managing editor for investment banking coverage at Dow Jones Newswires, in a statement.
“During this time of great change in markets, our editorial focus is firmly on delivering to investment bankers the intelligence that powers deals and transactions. With their industry experience, Paul and Donna will offer a unique perspective on firms, sectors and events for our investment banker readership.”
Sharma has 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. Prior to Dow Jones, he was a partner at a London-based hedge fund, Cheyne Capital Management, where he managed a telecommunications value fund. Prior to that, he was the director of telecommunications sales at HSBC and spent four years as vice president and lead telecommunications analyst at J.P. Morgan in London.Â
Before joining Dow Jones, Childs led the microfinance firm Childs Capital LLC, which she founded in 1998. Prior to this, she was president and chief operating officer of ERC Financial Market Products in New York, an investment banker in the financial institutions group of Goldman Sachs and a director at Swiss Reinsurance Company in Zurich. Childs has won multiple awards throughout her career, including the National Association of Women Business Owners’ ’2007 Woman Business Owner of the Year.’
Read more here.
Entries being accepted for Barlett & Steele Awards
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Entries Are Now Being Accepted for the Third Annual Barlett and Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism.
Named for the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning investigative business journalist team of Don Barlett and Jim Steele, these awards, funded by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, celebrate the best in print and online investigative business journalism.Â
The annual awards were first given out in fall 2007, and feature a Gold award of $5,000 and a Silver prize of $2,000.
For the 2009 awards, entries must have appeared between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009. Submission deadline is Aug. 3.
“The economic downturn has rightly put intense focus on scandal, greed and inequities throughout business and government,” said Andrew Leckey, president of the Reynolds Center at the ASU Cronkite School, in a statement. “Journalists at all sizes of publications and sites in the first two years of these awards have shown their determination to take on tough investigative business stories ranging from local neighborhood issues to global concerns.”
Barlett and Steele, who won two Pulitzers with The Philadelphia Inquirer and two National Magazine Awards at Time, have worked together for more than three decades. They are contributing editors to Vanity Fair.
Read more here.
Personal finance coverage intensifies
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TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
The competition in personal finance coverage has intensified in the past few years, said Jane Bryant Quinn, the pre-eminent personal finance columnist in the country.
She noted that Web sites devotes to personal finance, as well as new syndicated columnists, have increased the amount of content. The Associated Press earlier this month rolled out new weekly and monthly personal finance coverage. “I think it’s great,” said Quinn about the coverage.
The longtime Newsweek columnist said that the best personal finance coverage is local, telling them about issues in their communities.
“Many of the stories are national in scope, nevertheless,” added Quinn. She said she’s worried about the huge growth of products offered by mutual funds aimed at baby boomers as they near retirement.
“So much of it is good,” said Quinn about the current personal finance coverage. “I would not have said that 20 years ago. They read the prospectuses. I think our business in general do a very good job.”
Quinn said she likes to read Money, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and CNNMoney.com.
The one area where there is not a high quality of coverage is in investments. She also called that coverage “boring.” She added that there’s too much coverage about mutual funds and mutual fund managers.
She said the future of personal finance coverage is in explaining to consumers the design of products that they’re purchasing and how they work. “What ultimtaley makes the difference is the design of the products,” said Quinn.
The role of financial journalism in financial literacy
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Aaron London of the Daytona Beach News Journal writes Sunday about the impact of stories about business and the economy in the media have on financial literacy in the country.
“But that’s still not the real issue. At the time a particular story is printed or posted on the Web, it is generally the product of the best information available at that time. The problem is, 10 minutes after the presses start to run or after a reader points and clicks his way to another site, the story may change, or at least more information may come available.
“In this information glut, there is often little time for readers to sift through the various sources and put all of the pertinent information into a coherent whole. That is the job of the journalist and his or her editor, and for the most part it is done very well, day in and day out.
“But consumers don’t just want to know what’s going on today. They want to know what is going to happen tomorrow and next week and next month and a year from now. And even though objective journalists cannot provide such a glimpse into the future, there are plenty of other talking heads and rambling fingers out there who are more than happy to speculate on the economic future. As commentaries and acknowledged prognostications, there is definitely a place for these economic forecasters.”
Read more here.