Tag Archives: Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal names new ME for Europe
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The Wall Street Journal named Jesse Lewis as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe, effective June 1, 2006.
Lewis, 51, who has been deputy managing editor of the Journal Europe since August 2003, will have day-to-day responsibility for overseeing European and Middle East coverage and publishing the European edition of the Journal. He will manage the Journal Europe’s news desk and graphics editors in Brussels and help run the Journal staff’s close partnership with The Wall Street Journal Online and Dow Jones Newswires, the real-time financial and business news provider.
Working closely with Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Marcus Brauchli, Lewis will oversee the European edition’s relationship with the U.S. and Asian editions of the Journal and co-operate with the paper’s global editing and production operations based in New York and South Brunswick. Lewis will continue to be based in Brussels and will report to Michael Williams, the editor of the Journal Europe.
Lewis joined The Wall Street Journal’s copy desk in 1987. Before his move to Brussels, he held a variety of roles in the U.S, including global copy chief; Page One senior special writer; and news editor on the news desk.
Prior to joining the Journal, Lewis worked on various U.S. papers, including the Louisville Courier Journal (Kentucky); the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale (Florida); and the Ocala Star Banner (Florida). He was an assistant press secretary to Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh from 1979 to 1983.
Lewis gained a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1984, and holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and French from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1976.
Dow Jones industrial average celebrates 110th birthday
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The Dow Jones industrial average turned 110 today. In addition to helping promote the company and the Wall Street Journal, it’s played an important role in evaluating the stock market.
According to a press release put out by the Wall Street Journal’s parent, “‘The Dow’ is the world’s most frequently quoted and longest-serving market indicator of its kind, tracking the pillars of the U.S. economy since its creation by Charles Dow on May 26, 1896. The occasion was marked by the gathering of market leaders at the New York Society of Securities Analysts in New York and the unveiling of a survey that found an overwhelming 78% of the public know the Dow.”
Here is the press release.
Now, here is what Dow Jones doesn’t say about the index in its press release:
The successful Dow Jones industrial average was actually preceded by some stock listings that were not all that successful. In 1884, Dow compiled a list of nine railroad and two industrial stocks (among the companies were Western Union, the Union Pacific, the New York Central and the Louisville & Nashville railroads) and divided their prices by 11 to produce a stock market average. The average was first published on July 3, 1884.
Dow received complaints that the average was not representative of the overall market, so he refined his list, in 1885, 1886 and again in 1894. In 1896, The Journal published the first industrial stock average of 12 stocks, including General Electric, American Tobacco and American Sugar. The list would later be expanded to 20 stocks in 1916 and 30 stocks in 1928. In other words, the Dow Jones industrial average as we know it today has actually only been around for the last 88 years.
The average was also created at a time when other newspapers also had stock averages. For example, the New York Times used to have its own stock average. Stock averages compiled by newspapers were considered a way for the papers to write about what was going on in the stock market. It was only through savvy marketing and bullying that the Dow became the accepted average, and the other newspapers dropped their averages.
Today, a number of market experts would also argue that the Dow’s time has passed it by. A measure of 30 stocks is not the most accurate indicator of how the market is performing on a certain day. The S&P 500 and other averages are broader indicators.
Loeb finalists named
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The finalists for the Loeb Awards, administered by the UCLA Anderson School of Management, were named in a video conference on Monday by dean Judy D. Olian. There is no press release yet, and I did not catch all of the reporter’s names, but I did get all of the names of the newspapers and media outlets. The webcast can be viewed at http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/
(Updated at 2:27 p.m. EST) A press release is now available here, but the finalists have yet to be posted on the Loeb web site.
The Loeb Awards are considered the Pulitzer Prize of business journalism.
The finalists in the big newspaper category, circulation of more than 400,000, were USA Today, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The Atlanta entry was titled “Borrower beware,” while the WSJ entry was “Taxes and terrorism.” The New York Times’ writer was Barry Meier.
The finalists in the medium newspaper category, circulation between 150,000 and 400,000, were Toledo Blade, Sacramento Bee, Syracuse Post-Standard and Seattle Times. The Blade’s entry was for the rare coin scandal, while the Times’ entry was “Selling drug secrets.”
The finalists in the small newspaper category, circulation of less than 150,000, were the Willamette Week in Portland, Ore., the Allenton Morning Call, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Finalists in the magazine category were Barlett & Steele in Time magazine, Bloomberg Markets, The Economist, Barron’s and Carol Loomis for her story on Hewlett-Packard and ousted CEO Carly Fiorina in Fortune.
Finalists in the commentary category were the Boston Globe, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Finalists in the deadline category were the New York Times, the New Castle News Journal in Delaware for coverage of the sale of MBNA, the San Jose Mercury News for coverage of Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s ouster and the Detroit News.
Finalists in the beat reporting category were the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Press of Newport News, the St. Petersburg Times and the New York Times.
Finalists in the news service/online category were the Associated Press, CNetnews.com, Bloomberg News and TheStreet.com. The Bloomberg entry was “Big pharma’s shameful secret.”
Finalists in the TV deadline category were two entries from CBS News Sunday Morning and one each from ABC News and NBC Nightly News.
Finalists in the TV enterprise category were the ‘NewsHour’ with Jim Lehrer for “China Rising,” WFAA in Dallas, Leslie Stahl and staff of ’60 Minutes’ for “Illegal and Thriving” and ABC News for “11 Wall Street.”
Finalists in the business book category, a new category for 2006, were Thomas B. Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s “Freakonomics” and James Stewart’s “DisneyWar.”
Winners will be announced at the dinner on June 26 in New York.
Ad linage up at WSJ and Barron's, down for international
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Dow Jones Inc. reported Wednesday afternoon that advertising linage at its flagship Wall Street Journal newspaper was up in April, and its Barron’s publication also saw an increase in advertising. However, advertising was down in the international version of the WSJ.
Advertising revenue at The Wall Street Journal, including Weekend Edition, increased 8.3 percent in April on a 3.8 percent increase in advertising volume. Linage increases in financial, general and classified advertising were partially offset by a decrease in technology advertising.
In the financial advertising category at the Journal, April linage increased 17.2 percent due to increases in wholesale, retail, insurance and tombstone advertising. The Journal’s general advertising category linage increased 16.2 percent due to increases in corporate, travel, healthcare and luxury goods advertising, partially offset by declines in media, auto and professional services advertising. Linage in the Journal’s classified advertising category increased 2.2 percent as real estate classified advertising was virtually flat to last year with one less Friday in April 2006.
The Journal’s technology advertising linage declined 29.7 percent due to weak technology professional services, software and personal computer advertising, partially offset by a gain in communications advertising.
At Barron’s, total advertising revenue increased 6.9 percent on a 1.7 percent increase in advertising pages primarily due to a gains in general advertising, partially offset by declines in auto and financial advertising.
International advertising revenue declined 12.1 percent in April primarily due to advertising linage declines at the Asian and European editions of The Wall Street Journal.
Read more here.
WSJ's Steiger named new chairman of Pulitzer Prize Board
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The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Steiger, the paper’s managing editor, has been named chairman of the Pulitzer Prize board, according to a Monday news release. Let’s hope that this means that business news coverage will get more attention 
in the naming of the awards. No business journalism stories won a Pulitzer this year.
The release states that Steiger, who has been a board member since 1998, replaces Harvard University professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., who had served on the Pulitzer Board since 1997. Members of the board serve a maximum of nine years.
The 2006 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on April 17, 2006. An awards ceremony honoring this year’s winners will take place on May 22, 2006, at Columbia University, which administers the annual awards.
Read the release here.
SABEW members grill UnitedHealth CEO on stock options
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UnitedHealth Group CEO William McGuire was grilled by journalists at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference in Minneapolis on Monday about his $1.6 billion in stock options.
An investigation is trying to determine if the stock options were backdated to make them more profitable for the leader of one of the country’s largest health insurers.
Lauren Wilbert, a reporter for the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, wrote, “But when pressed about his $1.6 billion in stock options and whether he would resign if the investigation found those options were backdated to be more profitable, McGuire said he had no response beyond what the company finds and wants.
“‘Other people are more appropriate to address that than I,’ McGuire said to a WSJ reporter, when asked if he could explain UnitedHealth’s compensation program. He said he wanted to leave it up to independent groups, including one formed within in the company at his request, that are investigating the matter to ensure an unbiased outcome.
“McGuire said any gains to executives from compensation packages come out of shareholders’ pockets and not from customers’ health care costs, adding that nobody in the company could have imagined how successful the health insurer would become.
“‘Clearly these were unpredictable gains,’ McGuire said. ‘These stock options are coming off the tail end of a decade of incentive practices.’”
Read more here.
A Bloomberg story about the stock options brouhaha is available here.
Why Narisetti is leaving the WSJ
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MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman recently interviewed Wall Street Journal Europe editor Raju Narisetti on why he is leaving the newspaper to go head a start-up business newspaper in India, his home country.
Friedman writes, “Journalists in India, he points out with some measure of chagrin, give their customers a diet of spot-news stories but are somewhat reluctant to provide the in-depth and irreverent features that the Journal is known for.
“‘The more I thought about it,’ Narisetti told me by phone on Thursday, ‘the more it seemed to make a lot of sense to try and do, essentially, a start-up that’s going to be different, in the sense of being more analytical and interpretative and less about spot news — which is the tradition of Indian publications.’
“Narisetti added: ‘My biggest challenge is going to be creating a form of journalism that is different. There is not enough of stepping back and looking forward — lighthouse reporting, as opposed to lamppost reporting.’”
Read more here.
WSJ Online celebrates 10-year anniversary
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The Wall Street Journal Online is 10 years old, and the Web site is celebrating by making the site free for the next 10 days, according to a press release. This is a similar move to what fellow site Barron’s Online did earlier this year to try to get more subscribers.
In a story on the Web site, the paper notes that WSJ Online was close to going under in the early years.
The story reads in part: “When the newsroom staff filed in early Sunday morning, April 28, 1996, they found that something had gone horribly wrong with the publishing system. While the technical staff struggled through the day and into the night to fix the problem, editors assembled what they could. At some dark point in the process, a brief article was written for the print Journal announcing the delay:
“‘… Journal editors said they made the decision to delay the launch, which had been planned for today (mon.), because of problems with the new electronic editing system used to produce the Interactive Edition. They said they believed the problems would be solved in time to introduce the new publication tomorrow. (tues.)’”
Read about it here.
The press release states, “The celebration kicks off this morning when The Wall Street Journal Online will go live from Times Square in New York with a mobile newsroom.
Tomorrow, May 2, the Online Journal will hold a San Francisco event in partnership with the San Francisco metro (“MUNI”). WSJ.com will provide free passes to the metro, so consumers can commute for free, courtesy of the Online Journal.
“‘We are excited to share this milestone anniversary celebration with our subscribers and advertisers,’ said Gail Griffin, general manager of The Wall Street Journal Online. ‘For 10 years WSJ.com has been the primary source for business news on the Web, offering the best in-depth, real time news and information as well as award winning analysis and content. This Open House enables visitors to experience our features and get a taste of the great value of the Online Journal.’
Read the rest of the release here.
WSJ deputy bureau chief applauds cutting stock listings
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David Wessel, the Washington deputy bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, applauded the moves by newspapers across the country to cut their published stock listings and encourage readers to get that information online in a speech at Yale University.
Wessel, who writes a weekly Capitol column in the print edition of the paper, answers questions from readers in the Journal’s online edition, and appears regularly as a commentator on both TV (CNBC) and radio (NPR), also said in his speech that he believed that newspapers will exist in some form in the future.
The New Haven Independent’s Paul Bass wrote, “He noted that while the Journal has had to offer subscriber discounts to keep its print circulation at 1.75 million, its paid circulation jumped 8 percent last year alone, to 750,000 paid subscribers. However, advertisers have leapfrogged over the Journal’s website to lower-cost sites that reach their desired audience just fine.
“Ultimately, the Internet threat doesn’t scare him, Wessel said. A new business model will emerge that enables legitimate big news operations like the Journal to make money online. He didn’t guess what that model will be. (Some guesses from this corner: not-for-profit sites on the ‘All Things Considered’ model; an ever-changing sea of profitable small sites either selling advertising as a large group and/or relying on subscriptions; for-profit ‘editor’ sites that weed intelligently through thousands of newspaper websites, blogs, and government and corporate web sites to tailor RSS-style individualized news pages to customers.)”
Read more about Wessel’s comments here.
The power of the Wall Street Journal's front page
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TheDeal.com executive editor Yvette Kantrow weighed on on a Wall Street Journal story on Monday about a pending deal that Bear Stearns supposedly has in China. Kantrow notes that the story was being questioned later in the day by a Reuters report, but that many other media outlets accepted the story as the truth even though a deal has yet to be announced.
Kantrow writes, “Such is the power of the Journal’s front page. Put a story there, and no matter how thinly sourced or preliminary it is, or how many denials it collects, it almost automatically takes on the patina of fact or official announcement. Now at what point do ‘early talks’ — as the Journal’s headline refers to what’s going on between Bear Stearns and CCB — bloom into actual talks? Are ‘early discussions’ between a few top executives the same as negotiations? More importantly, are they really front-page news? Perhaps, as CNBC’s Charles Gasparino posited on SquawkBox Tuesday morning, the ‘talks’ here consist of a few Bear Stearns honchos making a ‘pitch’ to the folks at CCB. If that’s the case, wouldn’t the story be better suited for the Journal’s more speculative Heard on the Street column than for its august front page?
“Interestingly enough, Heard on the Street is exactly where the Journal, which hung on to this story like a Jack Russell terrier gnawing at Sam Breakstone’s leg, played its follow-up the next day, April 18. That piece noted CCB’s denial in its fourth paragraph, but quickly countered that ‘people familiar with the matter confirm there have been discussions involving top executives at Bear and a very small group of top people at the bank.’ In other words, ‘We called back our sources, and they assured us our story is right.’ Fine, though at this point a little more information on these anonymous sources might be helpful, as would an explanation of why they can’t be named.”
Read the rest of her critique here.