Tag Archives: Marketwatch
How to write for specific financial media
by Chris Roush
Joshua Brown writes on his Reformed Broker blog about what it takes to write for specific financial media outlets.
Here are some of his examples:
“How to write a stock article for CNNMoney or MarketWatch: Line up quotes from a bull and a bear on a given stock – give a paragraph to each to state their case on the company, conclude by saying it’s too early to tell who’s right.
“How to write a column in Barron’s: Take a random statistic from Bespoke Investment Group. Use it to tell a story. Nap the rest of the week until deadline. Wake up and repeat.
“How to write a book on investing: Grab your favorite rules and ideas from a few of the other 20,000 books on investing that came before yours. No one will notice and the rules are evergreen anyway so they probably should be repeated. Have your PR agent send me an email about your book twice a day until they get the auto-responder announcing my premature and tragic death.
“How to write for Motley Fool: For your subject, pick a stock with a high message board-to-headline ratio on Yahoo Finance (thus guaranteeing interest and clicks). Promote the CAPS community within the first paragraph, the last paragraph should essentially be an ad for Hidden Gems or Rule Breakers of some such newsletter product.
“How to write for TheStreet.com: Be Doug Kass.
“How to write for the Forbes or HuffPo network: Doesn’t matter, it’ll be buried amid seven million other pieces of content, no one will read it.”
Read more here.
Marketwatch columnist also a white nationalist, reports Business Insider
by Chris Roush
Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider is reporting that Marketwatch.com columnist Peter Brimelow is also a white nationalist who runs a website that argues against multiculturalism and immigration.
Weisenthal writes that he has reached out to Marketwatch and its parent, Dow Jones & Co., for a response, but has yet to receive one.
Weisenthal writes, “So it’s pretty obvious that Brimelow has too distinct modes: Racial polemicist part of the time, conservative, anodyne investment writer another part of the time.
“And maybe, at some level, it’s not that odd. A lot of what Brimelow writes about for Marketwatch is about what newsletter writers are saying, and the world of newsletters is filled with people who connect investing with dramatic, societal warnings (Hello Ron Paul newsletters!).
“But it’s certainly reasonable to ask Dow Jones whether it is 1) aware of, and 2) comfortable with Brimelow’s views on race and culture in America.”
Reuters editor in chief: We are full speed ahead
by Chris Roush
Reuters editor in chief Steve Adler spoke with Marketwatch.com media columnist Jon Friedman and said a new CEO of the news organization’s parent company, Thomson Reuters, won’t curtail its growth.
Friedman writes, “When I spoke with Adler on Monday, he couldn’t have sounded more confident that Smith, who will replace Tom Glocer on Jan. 1, will continue to have ‘an extraordinary commitment’ to Adler’s strategy of investing heavily to strengthen its commitment to enterprise reporting and to recruit journalists such as The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Williams and Bloomberg News television executive Dan Colarusso, who will run its video operations (The Journal, like MarketWatch, is owned by News Corp. )
“Adler said he, too, has heard the whispers from Thomson Reuters’ critics but declared: ‘This doesn’t change anything.’
“What’s also not likely to change is the industry’s confusion about what Adler wants to accomplish. Does he want his operation to be true to its roots as a British-based wire service that reports doggedly on financial markets or a gleaming long-form journalism operation that wants to be known for its enterprise and investigative reporting? Can Adler make both sides co-exist?
“Is Thomson Reuters, which was formed a few years ago, still a British concern to its core? Or does it want to be viewed as a distinctly American company? Adler shrugs off such questions and prefers to think of Thomson Reuters as a ‘global’ company that can tell the world’s stories.
“Still, Adler’s moves to bolster the enterprise-reporting wing spark the question: Where do Reuters’ customers, who depend on the company to give them real-time market-moving information, fit into the equation? They may not be too impressed that Reuters, for instance, has added Bethany McLean, the respected magazine journalist and co-author of ‘All the Devils Are Here.’”
Read more here.
Marketwatch.com holding contest to pick its next investment columnist
by Chris Roush
Marketwatch.com, a financial news site owned by Dow Jones & Co., is currently holding a contest to select its next investing columnist.
Voting is now open for round two, and voting remains open through Nov. 13.
The site says it will announce the six survivors — the three top vote-getters and three chosen by the MarketWatch judges’ panel — who will move on the final round on Nov. 14. MarketWatch’s judges will then choose the contest winner following a third submission of columns and round of voting. There will also be recognition for a people’s choice winner.
The winning columnist, who will be announced on Nov. 28, will have the opportunity to write for MarketWatch on a freelance basis for a selected period of time. The freelance contract is worth up to $15,000.
The column entries have been edited for grammar, punctuation and spelling before being posted, and they were limited to less than 1,000 words. The contestants have also had to disclose whether they were investors in any investments mentioned in their columns.
Dow Jones & Co. employees were not eligible for the contest.
Read the entries here.
Most widely read biz news site is, surprise, Yahoo Finance
by Chris Roush
Eric Jackson of Forbes.com looks at Compete numbers of traffic on business news sites and discovers that Yahoo Finance still gets more visitors than business news heavyweights such as The Wall Street Journal, CNNMoney and others.
Jackson writes, “And the biggest kahuna when it comes to financial news – at least by visitors — is none another than Yahoo! Finance.
“Below you’ll find the top sites by unique visitors in August and whether or not they’ve seen their numbers increase or decrease compared to the same period last year:
1. Yahoo! Finance – 30 mm uniques, up 21% Y/Y
2. New York Times (the whole paper – not just the Business section – although Dealbook.nytimes.com had 446k uniques) – 15 mm uniques, down 9% Y/Y
3. CNN Money – 11 mm uniques, up 16% Y/Y
4. Forbes – 10 mm uniques, up 17% Y/Y
5. Wall Street Journal – 7.5 mm uniques, down 22% Y/Y
6. Bloomberg – 6 mm uniques, up 10% Y/Y
7. Reuters – 5.5 mm uniques, up 2.6% Y/Y
8. CNBC – 4.3 mm uniques, up 41% Y/Y
9. BusinessWeek.com – 3.6 mm uniques, down 9%
10. MarketWatch – 3.6 mm uniques, down 13% Y/Y
Read more here.
Business media outlets accused of patent infringement
by Chris Roush
Bloomberg LP and Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, and five other media outlets were sued for allegedly infringing two patents for “instantaneous symbol lookup,” used on websites.
A Bloomberg News story states, “Boadin Technology LLC, which said it owns the rights to the patents, filed the lawsuit yesterday in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. Boadin, whose office is in Newark, Delaware, is seeking a finding of infringement and unspecified compensatory damages, according to the complaint.
“The news providers infringed Boadin’s patents by selling ‘certain computer products that embody’ the covered technology, according to the complaint, which said the companies used the technology on their websites.
“Other defendants include News Corp. units Fox News Network and Marketwatch Inc., Gannett Co. and Comcast Corp.’s CNBC TV network. Defendant Bloomberg LP is the parent company of Bloomberg News.
“Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman, and Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokeswoman, declined to comment on the suit. Charles Douglas, a Comcast spokesman, didn’t immediately comment. Jack Horner, a News Corp. spokesman, and Robin Pence, a spokeswoman for the Gannett newspaper chain, didn’t immediately return calls seeking comment.”
Investment newsletters and how they manipulate comparisons
by Chris Roush
In his column from Saturday, the Wall Street Journal‘s Jason Zweig smacks a few news organizations for bogus reporting of their stock-picking performance — including The Street.com and MarketWatch.com.
The criticism is interesting because The Journal and Marketwatch are both owned by News Corp. The trick many are playing is tracking their stock-picking performance including dividends against an index such as the S&P 500 without including dividends in the performance of the index.
Zweig writes, “Consider The Proactive Fund Investor, an online service edited by Bill Donoghue and distributed by MarketWatch, which, like The Wall Street Journal, is published by Dow Jones & Co. The newsletter recently compared its ‘total return’ to that of the S&P 500—without counting the dividends on the index.
“‘We don’t make a practice of promoting the performance of [our] newsletters,’ says MarketWatch editor-in-chief David Callaway, ‘because it inevitably leads to questions of accuracy.’
“To approximate Mr. Cramer’s return, you would have had to make an average of 774 trades annually over the past three years, Mr. Barton said.
“Meanwhile, you could have bought and held an S&P 500 index fund and then done utterly nothing except reinvest your dividends. And you, too, would have more than doubled the market’s return — calculated without dividends.”
Read more here. My take: The newsletters make a lot of money for their parent companies, but their touting hurts the credibility of business journalists at the same companies.
Dow Jones revenue up 5 percent through three quarters
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Les Hinton, the chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Co., sent the following message to employees of the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Marketwatch.com and Dow Jones Newswires on Thursday afternoon:
We enter this final fiscal quarter of 2011 with many accomplishments to our collective credit.
We continue to bring to the market new products that demonstrate not only the value of quality content but the capacity of Dow Jones to harness technology to the benefit of readers and customers.
Factiva is more intuitive, global, mobile and an indispensible engine of business awareness and intelligence. DJ FX Trader is still new and already yielding essential and valuable insights into the foreign-exchange market. Its utility was endorsed the best possible way when some of the world’s biggest banks were among the first to sign on. We are a leader among publishers on the tablet-computer platform, creating a new and dynamic experience for The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Dow Jones Investment Banker and soon Factiva too.
Our journalism continues to inform and enlighten audiences around the globe in a time of great tumult. We are grateful for the efforts and the courage of those who have performed with excellence amidst the devastation in Japan and through change and uncertainty in the Middle East.
Our progress is measurable. Through the first nine months of fiscal 2011, Dow Jones revenue increased 5%. That figure includes strong results from the Journal’s U.S. print edition (ad revenue up 7%, circulation revenue up almost 8%) and its digital editions (ad revenue up 19%, circulation revenue up 22%). Our business-to-business operations, by the third quarter, were showing new strength after the extended impact of the financial crisis.
Ours is an uncommon story in the news business. The Journal’s total ad revenue rose 2.6% in the fiscal third quarter, our sixth consecutive quarter of growth. At the New York Times, news group ad revenue fell 3.7% in the same quarter. Where the Journal’s total circulation revenue improved 8% in the quarter ended March, circulation revenue at the Times fell by 3.7%. The print Journal alone has recorded 17 consecutive quarters of circulation-revenue growth, including nearly 6% in the third quarter, as we broadened and improved it. What other newspaper can tell that story?
We achieved this growth with compelling ideas and with business discipline. The fact that we’re already counting many millions in incremental subscription and advertising dollars from our products on tablet computers says a lot about our ability to seize the opportunities of new technology.
To make sure we can carry on building on our successes, we must continue to manage both investment and expense aggressively. I want to thank you all for your contributions.
How The Economist engages readers
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Marketwatch.com media columnist Jon Friedman interviewed Paul Rossi, managing director of The Economist in the Americas, about how the magazine attracts readers.
Biz media more favorable toward Facebook than Google
by Chris Roush
Howard Gold writes Friday on Marketwatch.com that the business media has written more favorably about Facebook during its initial public offering than it did when Google went public.
“But almost every piece I read acknowledged the company’s huge success and its dominant position in social networks. And the coverage of Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been overwhelmingly favorable, if not fawning, with only a couple of snickers about his wearing a hoodie to the company’s New York IPO road show meeting.
“Why was I so surprised? Because I also read dozens of articles about the last great Internet IPO, that of Googlein August 2004. And the contrast couldn’t have been more striking.
“The financial media’s take on Google’s IPO was unremittingly negative. I estimate 98% of the articles trashed the company, the whole unconventional Dutch auction IPO process, even its co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Writers were openly contemptuous of Google’s prospects and warned investors explicitly not to buy.”
Read more here.