Tag Archives: New York Times
NYT biz columnist Stewart to speak at university’s commencement
by Chris Roush
James Stewart, a New York Times business columnist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, has been invited to speak at the DePauw University graduation ceremony next year.
Matthew Cecil and Dana Ferguson of The DePauw write, “Stewart, who had yet to receive notice of the invitation, said he was ‘humbled’ by the news.
“‘If the invitation materializes, I think it’s safe to say I would consider it a great honor,’ he said.
“Executive Director of Media Relations Ken Owen said he will be a strong speaker and an appropriate representative of DePauw.
“‘For a place that graduated a couple of the greatest journalists of the last 150 years, to celebrate someone like Jim Stewart, who is really a modern day equivalent of Barney Kilgore,’ Owen said. ‘It’s a perfect fit.’
“President Brian Casey said senior student senators approached him with their selection, and he agreed that Stewart would be an ‘excellent choice.’
“Casey noted that Stewart has received an honorary degree from DePauw University as well as several other honors.”
Read more here.
NYT to expand its tech blog
by Chris Roush
The New York Times is expanding its tech blogging, writes Jennifer Saba of Reuters.
Saba writes, “The expanded coverage will encompass a broader range of subjects like ‘big data,’ ‘cloud computing’ and security issues.
“‘It’s an area the Times has never had a lot of reporting,’ said Damon Darlin, technology editor who oversees the site.
“The Times recently hired three new reporters to its tech desk – Quentin Hardy, Nicole Perlroth and Brian X. Chen – to help beef up its coverage and contribute to the blog along with other Times tech reporters. The expansion also includes a new section called ‘Scuttlebot’ that will aggregate tech stories of interest from across the Web.
“Traditionally the Times’ tech coverage has had a more consumer-centric bent. But with hacking in the headlines and the term cloud computing popping up in TV commercials, for example, these issues are becoming more mainstream. ‘Whether they know it or not, it effects (consumers),’ Darlin said.”
Read more here.
NYT hires two for tech beat
by Chris Roush
New York Times tech editor Damon Darlin and business editor Larry Ingrassia sent out the following staff hire announcement:
We are pleased to announce the hiring of two reporters for the Business Day technology team. Nicole Perlroth and Brian X. Chen will be joining the staff to write for the expanded Bits blog as well as for the paper.
Nicole comes to us from Forbes, where she covers Silicon Valley startups and venture capitalists. She has been responsible for Forbes’s Midas List, an annual ranking of top dealmakers in tech and life science venture capital. She wrote cover stories on technology investors Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel. She will be based in the San Francisco bureau and will report primarily on computer security and privacy issues.
Nicole, who grew up in Silicon Valley, is a 2004 graduate of Princeton, majoring in political science and Near Eastern studies, and also received an M.A. in journalism from Stanford University. She began her journalism career doing research for Philip Taubman, the former Times editor and investigative reporter.
She spends a lot of her free time under water and recently overcame a deep-seated fear of sharks by swimming from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco.
Brian most recently worked at Wired.com, where he wrote about mobile phones. He delved so deeply into the subject that a book emerged, “Always On,” about how the smartphone revolution has transformed society, business and culture. Brian will be bringing that knowledge and perspective to his reporting on the mobile devices and the wireless industry beat from New York.
Brian, a 2006 graduate of the University of California, Davis, started his career in the gadget labs of Macworld magazine and has also written for Details and the Atlantic. He is also writing the script for a documentary on electronic waste in Africa and the repair technicians there who convert the junk into workable devices.
He says that his parents didn’t give him a middle name, so he adopted the X, which he says stands for Xavier.
Please join us in welcoming Nicole and Brian to the staff.
NYT media reporter joining politics desk
by Chris Roush
Dick Stevenson, the politics editor at the New York Times, sent out the following staff announcement on Wednesday:
The presidential candidates, their allies and various interest groups are likely to raise billions of dollars by the time Election Day rolls around a year from now, and they will spend most of it on advertising. So we’ve decided to make a commensurately big investment: We are bringing Jeremy Peters onto the political team to cover the ways in which campaigns and outside groups use advertising and other media and communications strategies to sell candidates, ideologies and issues.
This is a rich field, one that Jim Rutenberg, among others, tilled for us to great effect in previous cycles. Advertising is how most voters experience campaigns. It is the visible element of sophisticated strategies that in some cases resemble selling soap and in others veer into the political dark arts. Its practitioners are among the most colorful people in the business.
Jeremy comes to us from Media, where he has done terrific work with Bruce Headlam and his team, most recently on Rupert Murdoch. He started stringing for The Times as a senior at the University of Michigan when the National desk needed an extra set of legs on the ground in Detroit right after the 9/11 attacks. He subsequently spent two years living on St. Thomas reporting for The Virgin Islands Daily News. Then The Times brought him back in 2004 as a contract freelancer in the Detroit bureau. He was hired on staff in 2006, and since then has covered economics and financial news for Continuous News and Biz Day, two state houses for Metro (Trenton and Albany) and since last summer, the media.
Jeremy is finishing up some final assignments for the Media desk and will move over to politics after that.
Pulitzer winner Stewart named winner of Bell award
by Chris Roush
James B. Stewart, a New York Times business columnist and award-winning financial journalist and author, is the 2011 winner of the Elliott V. Bell Award, honoring an individual’s lifetime contributions to the field of financial journalism, from the New York Financial Writers Association.
Stewart currently writes the “Common Sense” column for the Business Day section of The Times. In 1988, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for his articles in The Wall Street Journal about the 1987 dramatic upheaval in the stock market and insider trading. These writings led to the best-selling ”Den of Thieves” that recounted the criminal conduct of Wall Street arbitrager Ivan Boesky and junk bond king, Michael Milken.
He was named page one editor of The Journal in 1988 and stayed with the paper until 1992 when he left to help found SmartMoney. DisneyWar, his 2005 book on Michael Eisner’s reign at Disney, won the Gerald Loeb Award for Best Business Book.
He is the author of 11 books including “Tangled Webs: How False Statements are Undermining America from Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff” and “Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story Of A Doctor Who Got Away With Murder,” which won the 2000 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category.
He also won the George Polk Award in 1987 and Gerald Loeb awards in 1987, 1988 and 2006. Trained as a lawyer, he was previously the executive editor of American Lawyer magazine. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.
He is a graduate of DePauw University, where he serves on the board, Harvard Law School, and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he is now Bloomberg Professor of Business and Economic Journalism.
The NYFWA membership is invited to Bell Award presentation ceremony on Wednesday, Oct. 19, at 7 p.m., at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, 219 West 40th Street. There will be a wine and cheese reception following the award presentation. Send RSVPs to nyfwa@aol.com. Your name must be on the list to be admitted to the CUNY building.
For a list of previous winners, see here. Bell was editor and publisher of BusinessWeek from 1950 to 1967.
New biz magazines to provide advice on using social media
by Chris Roush
Jennifer Preston of The New York Times writes Monday about four new magazines offering business owners advice on how to use social media.
Preston writes, “The magazines, published by GSG World Media, will cost $7.95 each at Office Depot stores. They will also be free in various digital formats to five million people who will receive an e-mail from Office Depot this week. The magazines are called: Tweeting & Business; LI & Business; fb & Business and The Big G & Business. A related Web site called socialmediamags.com will open on Monday.
“Despite the huge volume of information about social media tips and tools online and in print, Eric Yaverbaum, associate publisher of the magazines, says he and his partners see an opportunity to use the print magazine format to reach some business owners trying to learn more about the digital world. He said that they were printing a total of 250,000 copies of the magazines at their introduction.
“‘Small-business owners and entrepreneurs are all trying to figure social media out,’ Mr. Yaverbaum said. ‘Print magazines help make the information accessible to them. There will be great success stories and useful information.’
“Jeffrey W. Hayzlett, the former chief marketing officer for Kodak, and one of the early evangelists for Twitter, is the editor of the magazine about Twitter. He will also have a monthly column and videos offering tips.”
Read more here.
WSJ asset management reporter Pilon leaving for NY Times sports desk
by Chris Roush
Mary Pilon, a writer for the Money & Investing section of The Wall Street Journal, is leaving the business newspaper for a job at The New York Times.
Pilon blogs that she will be a sports reporter at the Times.
She writes, “For over three years, I’ve worked with an incredible team of journalists at The Wall Street Journal. Through many a crisis, my colleagues here have proven to be completely unflappable, professional and passionate about great reporting. It’s a dynamite newsroom full of incredible people.
“I’m incredibly excited about the new role at the NYT and look forward to hearing everyone’s rants and raves about the wide world of sports.”
Pilon took over the Journal’s coverage of the asset management industry back in February.
Pilon made a name for herself writing about movie days at the NYSE, blimps and Jane Austen. She produced stories on short-sellers trying to influence federal policy on for-profit colleges, on how the recession shut down the bank of mom and dad, and, with Jason Zweig, on how financial advisers are using new tricks to dupe investors.
Dealbook turns 10, and Sorkin tweaks title
by Chris Roush
Dealbook, the Wall Street news site from the New York Times, turns 10 years old on Saturday, and editor and founder Andrew Ross Sorkin writes that he’s changing his title for the site to better reflect his role in its operation.
Sorkin writes, “With such a tremendous group in place, 10 years later, I felt it was time to tweak my title in DealBook’s nameplate to better reflect the enormous contributions of the reporting and editing team. It will be Editor-at-Large. Of course, I will continue overseeing the team and writing, recruiting new talent and developing new projects for DealBook. That last item is a bit of a tease – we’ve got a number of exciting new projects under development that we hope to bring you in 2012, so stay tuned.”
Read more here. In an e-mail to Talking Business News, Times business editor Larry Ingrassia said the change means little for Dealbook.
“Like any fast growing venture, DealBook keeps evolving,” wrote Ingrassia. “It carries more stories and columns than ever, so there is more day-to-day editing and management shared by a team. Andrew remains deeply involved, continuing to provide the vision and helping to oversee coverage issues, as well as writing his column and stories, as noted in the announcement.”
NYT’s Dealbook hires writer from Huffington Post
by Chris Roush
Kat Stoeffel of the New York Observer reports that the Dealbook section of the New York Times has hired William Alden from the Huffington Post.
Stoeffel writes, “Mr. Alden (Yale ’10, NYO intern ’10) has been working at the Huffington Post for a little over a year, writing about mortgage and banking crises, as well as municipal debt.
“He was overseen by a former Timesman, Mr. Goodman, a member of the Times‘ financial crisis Pulitzer team who was recently accused of “scoffing” at the Times from his HuffPo perch. (Mr. Keller was then accused of twisting Mr. Goodman’s words.)
“That Mr. Alden was spotted at The Huffington Post suggests it’s a more formidable news competitor than The Times likes to admit. But then, as Times public editor Arthur Brisbane pointed out, it’s just DealBook–that’s not really the Times.”
Read more here.
How Steve Jobs changed business journalism
by Chris Roush
New York Times business columnist David Carr writes Thursday about how deceased Apple CEO Steve Jobs impacted business journalism.
“Now, young reporters with good prospects often start in business coverage, becoming conversant in unit sales, earnings per share, and Ebidta. The best and brightest of them can be found chasing the latest rumor out of Silicon Valley or peering under the hood of the just-hatched start-up. There are a lot of forces in play that make that so, but you’d have to credit Steve Jobs with making business something that did not belong to the suits.
“Business reporters hated Apple’s secrecy and found Mr. Jobs’s arrogance wearying, but we all knew that our craft picked up some glitz and esteem because of his involvement. Our readers, his consumers, cared about the guy and everything he did. He made business cool by using it to make cool stuff. It was fun to be along for the ride.”
Read more here.