Tag Archives: TheStreet.com
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.
Top 10 biz journalism events for 2011
by Chris Roush
TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Here are the top 10 events in business journalism in the past 12 months:
10. Randall Lane’s hiring as editor of Forbes in August. The business magazine has undergone a design and conceptual overhaul under Lewis Dvorkin. Now it’s time for Lane to execute with improved content that will draw in readers.
7. Michael Arrington leaves Tech Crunch. The tech blog is now owned by AOL, and founder Arrington left after he decided to run a venture capital fund investing in tech companies. The potential conflict of interest raised many questions and caused a rift with the site’s staff, which
more than 250 PBS stations opened new bureaus, introduced new segments and trimmed its staff, firing its managing editor. It was also sold for the second time in two years.
3. Death of CNBC anchor Mark Haines. Haines took no crap from his colleagues and the guests he interviewed on CNBC. His untimely departure from the No. 1 business news network has left a big void that has yet to be filled.TheStreet.com targeted by activist investor as CEO steps down
by Chris Roush
TheStreet.com, which today announced that CEO Daryl Otte is stepping down, is under attack by an activist investment fund called FiveT Capital, reports Eric Savitz of Forbes.
Savitz writes, “The Zurich-based fund, run a German investor named Johannes Minho Roth, has acquired a 6.3% stake in the company. FiveT disclosed the stake in a form 13D filing with the SEC.
“The filing included a copy of a letter the firm sent to the board of TheStreet, agitating for change and requesting a board seat. The letter points out that the company’s market cap is less than its balance sheet cash, and suggesting that the company’s assets might be worth more sold off in pieces.
“Here’s a copy of the letter:
To the Members of the Board,
As strategic investors, we (FiveT Capital AG, the Advisor of the FiveMore Fund) believe in the long-term perspectives of TheStreet. However, after years of patience, we now feel the time has come to take immediate action and are expressing our views to the board in public.
TheStreet is in urgent need of a strategic and financial review to ascertain best options for shareholders.”
Read more here.
A new business news term?
by Chris Roush
TheStreet.com‘s top headline for the unified central bank action taken Wednesday morning coins a new word.
Is this something that your media organization would use as well?
TheStreet.com plans to become the Internet business section
by Chris Roush
Daryl Otte, the CEO of TheStreet.com, discussed the financial news information company’s strategy of providing its content to other media providers during the company’s earnings conference call on Wednesday.
Otte said:
TheStreet sites performed well in terms of user engagement as measured by time per visit for the quarter, ranking among the top of the leaders in our field. Engagement is an important measure of the intensity and interest with which users consume contents on a site. And our performance in this statistic shows that as we grow audience size, we are retaining quality.
Our robust traffic growth is due in part to investments we have continued to make in improving natural search discovery of our content, the rollout of our new mobile offering and expanded third party content distribution arrangements. These three sources deliver new high quality qualified users. And as a group have become an important source of audience for us in recent quarters.
Let’s turn follow our business we know that we are increasing the size of our audience via content distribution agreements to withstand some important new deals or signs in this past quarter. Among them are arrangements with a variety of horizontal news outlets including large newspaper chains, such as Gatehouse, Media Network and Freedom Communications.
These agreements when fully implemented present an opportunity for significantly expanded distribution of the company’s content putting it in front of the incremental quality audiences. Many of these arrangements were signed in conjunction with the rollout of our newly launched TheStreet Business Desk service, which is the right offering at the right time in my view for horizontal quality publishers seeking comprehensive business and market coverage for their audiences.
We ended the quarter with agreements for this service, which will bring a number of instances for the service to over 300. You will begin to see them online soon as we have built some proprietary technology to develop and manage these quite efficiently. Even after its current early stage of our build-out TheStreet Business Desk, will reach an unduplicated national business audience of scale reaching underserved audiences in high economic pockets in 2016. With the rollout of this new service TheStreet is becoming the internet business section.
Read the full transcript here.
There are jobs in business journalism
by Chris Roush
TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Business journalism organizations are hiring despite the gloom in the media organization, according to a panel of recruiters and editors on Friday.
“We’ve had a good growth story over the last several years,” noted CNNMoney executive editor Chris Peacock, adding that his staff was at 25 seven years ago but now has 70 people. “We’re looking to expand in the coming year” by about 10 percent.
There are about 45 open positions at Reuters, said Walden Siew, an editor at the wire service.
“We’ve been steadily adding positions,” added Glenn Hall, the editor in chief at TheStreet.com. “And I expect that to continue for the next several years.”
The panel was part of the fall Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference held in New York. The panelists also provided tips on finding jobs in business journalism.
“You have to report really well. You have to have high standards,” said Beth Hunt, manager of editorial operations at American City Business Journals, which owns 40 weekly business newspapers across the country. “You have to constantly be expanding your skill set.”
Hunt said that staffs at ACBJ papers are not expanding, but the papers are hiring for positions that have been open for a whle and replacing reporters and editors when they leave. “We are hiring, and there are 40 potential places to go,” said Hunt.
Business journalists need to have skills beside being able to write earnings stories and reading balance sheets, said Peacock. They need to be able to use social media and appear on television as well.
“I put a high value on enthusiasm,” said Hall. “Enthusiasm about exploring new socal media opportunities…If they don’t have enthusiasm, that’s my cue to look at another candidate.”
In terms of not getting jobs, Hunt said a big turnoff is when the applicant hasn’t prepared. She recently asked a job applicant about a recent issue about an ACBJ paper. When the applicant said he hadn’t been reading the paper, she immediately led him out of the office.
“If you don’t know where you want to be, if you haven’t had that conversation with yourself, it’s difficult to conduct a good job interview,” said Hunt. “If you want to work for Bloomberg, you would hate my office.”
Hall said he wants to know how many followers a job applicant has on Twitter, whether they have a blog, and whether they have updated a video on YouTube.
“The ones who have created an opportunity for themselves, they are higher up in my esteem,” said Hall. “I only hire multimedia journalists.”
TheStreet.com and Gatehouse Media strike content deal
by Chris Roush
TheStreet.com announced that it has reached a deal to provide its investing and personal finance content to GateHouse Media newspapers.
TheStreet, which publishes more than 3,000 original articles and 500 unique videos each month, will make its content available for GateHouse Media to integrate into its local business coverage.
“Combining our depth and breadth of financial coverage with GateHouse’s strong presence in the local markets they serve will enhance the digital growth strategies of both companies and solidify TheStreet in its position as the Internet’s Business Section, reaching a highly targeted, unduplicated, engaged and affluent audience,” said Daryl Otte, the CEO of TheStreet.com, in a statement.
GateHouse, formerly Liberty Group Publishing, has 79 newspapers. Its newspapers include the Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin, the Register-Mail in Galesburg, Ill., the Rockford Register-Star in Rockford, Ill., and the Quincy (Mass.) Patriot-Ledger.
Read more here.
Memoirs of a markets reporter
by Chris Roush
Chao Deng, who covers the markets for TheStreet.com, writes Monday for Columbia Journalism Review about the experience.
Deng writes, “I wanted a beat with broader appeal. And sure enough, less than three months after the switch, page-views on my stories were soaring. My new-found popularity wasn’t because I had suddenly became a brilliant writer. It was because a volatile turn in the markets simply begged for an explanation, sending thousands of extra readers my way.
“At about the same time, though, the drudgery of writing the market-close story — stocks up on this; stocks down on that — began to make me wonder whether chasing the inevitable day-to-day ups and downs of markets was worth anyone’s time. Some critics say markets reporters must suffer from A.D.D., because short-term fluctuations in stock indices really don’t matter much in the long run. They say it’s absurd to pin a single narrative on spot news involving countless individual decisions, many of them made by robots. Too often, coverage favors one slant if stocks are up and another if stocks are down when, in fact, nobody really knows.
“And yet, the bigger the swing in the Dow, the more urgent the need to chase down an explanation, even if it’s a short-term one. Indeed, larger swings actually predict greater reader interest, which, in turn, validates the coverage.
“The public understands that something is a bit off-kilter, as we see frequently in reader comments on our daily market stories.”
Read more here.
TheStreet.com strikes content deal with Freedom
by Chris Roush
TheStreet.com has struck a deal with Freedom Communications, which owns newspapers and television stations across the country, to provide its personal finance and investing content to Freedom’s media operations.
Under the agreement, TheStreet will provide the national business, financial markets and personal finance coverage at Freedom Communications’ major online news sites and print publications, which includes the Orange County Register. The arrangement begins with the Register.
Glen Hall, the editor in chief at TheStreet.com, was once the business editor at the Register.
TheStreet network publishes more than 3,000 articles and more than 500 videos each month that will be available for Freedom Communications to integrate into its individual news sites.
“This alliance will create a powerful combination of independent, original reporting that will broaden the online and print content offered through Freedom Communications’ channels and expand the reach of TheStreet into new markets, creating value for both our businesses,” said TheStreet CEO Daryl Otte in a statement.
Read more here.
WSJ’s coverage of AT&T beats that from NYT
by Chris Roush
TheStreet.com media critic Marek Fuchs thinks that The Wall Street Journal did a better job than The New York Times in covering news from AT&T during the Thanksgiving break.