Poynter Online
Go


Most Recent Articles
Most E-mailed
Recent Comments
Recent Tags
Community Activity

Poynter Training
Poynter Seminars
Small, in-person training experiences.
News University
Today's most popular courses on NewsU, Poynter's e-learning site for journalists.
Webinars
Our online classroom is just a click away. Learn more.
All Webinars

Top News
Hot Comments
Most Linked
Most Clicked
Most Active
Widgets
powered by blognetnews.com
Media News

Search: 

Media News Blogs

refresh

CJR : The Audit

  • Friday Links: Smart Money, Rodney King, Dilution

    Remember that $500 million program for small businesses Goldman Sachs announced along with its apology earlier this week? It was splashed on C1 of The Wall Street Journal and A1 of The New York Times, which wrote that "the bank said Tuesday that it would spend $500 million ? [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 20, 2009, 5:46pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Bloomberg Finds the Fed on Bubble Watch

    Bloomberg gets a nice scoop that the Federal Reserve is apparently worried about the new bubble it's inflating. Federal Reserve officials are stepping up scrutiny of the biggest U.S. banks to ensure the lenders can withstand a reversal of soaring global-asset prices, according to people with knowledge of the [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 20, 2009, 5:31pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • WSJ Editorial Scrutinizes Geithner on AIG Counterparties

    I wrote twice on Tuesday about the bizarre Tim Geithner quote that "the financial condition of the counterparties was not a relevant factor" in his decision to bail out AIG. I called it a "stunner" and said it ought to be "second-day-story number one." Now we're to the fourth [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 20, 2009, 10:12am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • What's a News Brief Worth?

    The Journal Inquirer, of Manchester, Conn., which over the summer forced its larger rival, the Hartford Courant, to admit to plagiarizing some of the JI's local news coverage, took its dispute a step further yesterday, suing the Courant for copyright infringement and seeking unspecified money damages. The JI has [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 20, 2009, 9:08am EST by Dean Starkman
  • Thursday Links: Custard Ken, (More) Media Layoffs, Chainsaw Guy

    The Wall Street Journal has a very good page-one leder on Ken Griffin's giant hedge fund firm Citadel, which is not as giant as it was, cratering 55 percent last year (it's made up a decent amount of it back this year). The Journal gets inside the company to [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 19, 2009, 7:44pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Prospect's Take on Too Big to Fail

    The British magazine Prospect has one of the better explainers on too big to fail I've yet seen. It's a very good overview of the problem—a one-stop shop if you still haven't figured out why we're always calling on the press to emphasize it. It starts with an excellent [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 19, 2009, 2:18pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • A Good Bloomberg Profile of Elizabeth Warren

    Bloomberg this morning posts a really good profile of Elizabeth Warren, who, despite much of the press's dismissal of her earlier this year, has become one of the most influential people in Washington. Her Consumer Financial Protection Agency is very likely to become law soon, and it's quite possible [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 19, 2009, 10:23am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Wednesday Links: Philly's Mod Policy, Fraud Force, WoW

    The New York Times looks at Philadelphia's way of dealing with the foreclosure crisis: Forcing homeowners and lenders face to face to try to hash out a modification before the bank can foreclose. This is good reporting that remind us how heavy this stuff is. This third generation owner [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 18, 2009, 8:03pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Tyrangiel Takes Over at BusinessWeek

    Bloomberg surprised just about everybody by picking Josh Tyrangiel of Time to helm the newly acquired (and newly gutted—it's sacking a quarter of the staff) BusinessWeek. All of the stories made sure to note prominently in a sort of raised-eyebrows way that Tyrangiel is but a wee lad of [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 18, 2009, 2:27pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Trains, Planes, and Carbon Offsets

    This week, The New York Times published two much-needed articles questioning the value of programs that let consumers pay a small fee to ostensibly reduce their carbon footprints. The first, by Kate Galbraith, focused on renewable energy certificates, which allow utilities to offer their customers the choice of paying [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 18, 2009, 1:31pm EST by Curtis Brainard
  • WSJ Zeroes in on Goldman Collateral

    The Wall Street Journal fleshes out the Goldman Sachs backdoor bailout part of the Special Inspector General of the TARP's AIG report issued yesterday. Basically, the SIGTARP says Goldman was bailed out by the AIG bailout, something the firm (an Audit funder) has denied until now, as you can [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 18, 2009, 10:19am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Tuesday Links: Lowballing OSHA, Lowenstein, SIGTARP

    The New York Times reports that employers systematically under-report workplace injuries, citing a new GAO report. It says OSHA will adopt the GAO's recommendations, including "requiring inspectors to interview employees during all audits to check the accuracy of employer-provided injury data." Also: But the G.A.O. report cited several academic [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 17, 2009, 6:48pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • The Debt Privilege

    We all know too much debt is at the root of the economic crisis. And we've seen lots of step-back pieces on the conditions that created the environment for that debt creation—monetary policy, of course, but also the advent of securitization, the credit-default swap, etc. But we haven't seen [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 17, 2009, 5:22pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Misplaying the SIGTARP Report

    Did the Federal Reserve have any leverage in its negotiations with AIG counterparties, the ones it paid one hundred cents on the dollar to for stuff worth far less? And if it did have some, how much? That's the nut of the whole question, flared anew today by the [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 17, 2009, 1:32pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • The Backdoor-Bailout Report Coverage

    Here's a win for the press, namely The New York Times and Bloomberg. The government, or one of its internal watchdogs anyway, the TARP Inspector General, looks at the AIG backdoor bailout of Wall Street (and France and Germany, etc.) that the two outlets have been writing about since [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 17, 2009, 10:27am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Monday Links: New Bubble; Raters; Government Support

    Steven Pearlstein says the Federal Reserve still hasn't learned its lesson about credit bubbles. Pearlstein adds to the growing chorus saying the Fed's policies have created a secondary bubble. — The Big Money has a piece looking at why the credit-ratings agencies haven't been held to account for their [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 16, 2009, 5:30pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Bloomberg: Bankers Doubling Down in Vegas

    Bloomberg has an interesting real estate story showing how banks are getting entangled in the wreckage of their loans. Deutsche Bank forced developer Ian Bruce Eichner to hand it the keys to his Cosmopolitan Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Well, not exactly the keys. The project is still [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 16, 2009, 1:56pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Survey: Half of U.S. Would Pay (a Pittance) for Online News

    The New York Times reports on a new survey that says half of Americans would pay for news online if only they were charged. The bad news? They're only willing to pay an average $3 a month. That's largely because there's more free content here than in other major [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 16, 2009, 6:12am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Friday Links: Conspiracy Check, Weak TBTF Defenses, The Road

    Gary Weiss at The Big Money takes a good look at five conspiracy theories about Wall Street and ranks their plausibility. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone goes one for two here. Weiss, a longtime critic of naked-short conspiracists, writes that Taibbi's idea that naked shorting helped kill Lehman Brothers [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 13, 2009, 5:03pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Missing the Big Pfizer Kelo Story

    (UPDATE: Ted Mann of The Day points out that he wrote a news story before the Times on the Kelo angle, which I linked to [best I could—he's passed along one that actually works], so I've fixed the deck to clarify what I intended: That the NYT was out [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 13, 2009, 4:02pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • A Perfect Bit of Uncountered PR Nonsense on Overdrafts

    The Federal Reserve is effectively banning the "overdraft protection" racket on debt cards by forcing banks to make customers opt-in to such a "service." Almost nobody really wants a service that on average costs you $368 a year, for letting you overdraw your account by twenty cents or whatever. [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 13, 2009, 10:37am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Thursday Links: 10,000 Applications, Glass Steagall Day, TARP

    The Washington Post reports on the jobless "recovery," a term it's still too early to use for the economy given that we've had one quarter of positive GDP growth and that was entirely due to increased government spending. But it's a nice look at how this plays out. Imagine [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 12, 2009, 7:56pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • NYT Examines the Impact of the Crisis on Kids

    A few weeks ago I praised a Sesame Street special, of all things, for putting a human face on the impact of the economic crisis on families. Today, The New York Times does something similar with a page-one story and audio slide show on kids whose parents have been [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 12, 2009, 1:47pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • WSJ Tinkers With a Perfectly Good Story

    The Wall Street Journal has an interesting front-page story on tinkerers this morning, but the paper undermines it with a silly reach and a misleading headline aimed at newsifying the piece. Who doesn't want to read about inventors clinking away in their garages making absinthe-cocktail-mixing "Barbots" or 3D printers? [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 12, 2009, 10:18am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Wednesday Links: Wages, Pre-rolling in It, State Capitalism, Po' Boys

    Breakingviews would like you to know, in its coldly calculating way, that Americans earn too much relative to the rest of the world and that we need to earn less while they earn more. Why? Well, free trade, which if you take it to its logical conclusion, which its [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 11, 2009, 8:57pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • A Snapshot of a Journalist at Work on Bear Stearns

    With Bear Stearns' Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin in the news, Janet Tavakoli passes along an excerpt from her new book we thought might be interesting to Audit readers—not only because it relates to Bear hedge funds' doings, but also because it shows a good business journalist at work. [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 11, 2009, 2:16pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Some Misses on the Bear Stearns Acquittals

    The only Wall Street executives to be charged in the crisis walked away from a Brooklyn courthouse free men after a jury cleared them of lying to investors and insider trading. But the stories about Bear Stearns' Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin are a bit incomplete. For one reason [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 11, 2009, 11:30am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • WSJ Scoops on AIG

    The WSJ scores a nice scoop this morning with word that the relatively new head of AIG wants to quit over government compensation restrictions. The news falls into the medium-sized category since CEO Robert Benmosche hasn?t actually done anything yet, and the leak may be tactical. But still, director-level [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 11, 2009, 8:19am EST by Dean Starkman
  • Tuesday Links: One-Source FT, Soaring APRs, Severance

    The Financial Times runs one of those no-context, let's-quote-one-source-with-obvious-bias stories it likes to do, this one on global food corporations saying it's foolish for countries to try to be self-sufficient in their food supply, even in the wake of the massive disruptions of last year. Unsurprisingly, the multinational corporations [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 10, 2009, 10:26pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Loyal Readers and Junk Traffic

    (See the first part of this post) What the Journal does have that nobody else does is more than a million paying subscribers to its Web site, giving it what I've very roughly estimated at $60 million to $70 million a year in subscription revenue. But—and this is critical—that [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 10, 2009, 1:29pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • What's Murdoch Up to with Google and WSJ.com?

    Everybody's all inflamed about Rupert Murdoch bumbling through part of an interview on News Corp.'s Internet strategy, in which he said that he might block Google from indexing Wall Street Journal content online or some such thing. You'd be a fool to underestimate Murdoch's intelligence, no matter how familiar [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 10, 2009, 12:29pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Monday Links: Bad Stats, TBTF, "Less with Less"

    The New York Times reports that "A widening gap between data and reality is distorting the government?s picture of the country?s economic health, overstating growth and productivity in ways that could affect the political debate on issues like trade, wages and job creation." It says economists are trying to [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:54pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • LAT a Bit Wide of the Mark on Health Care

    The Los Angeles Times's David Lazarus beats back an accusation of using a red herring—and then goes on to push a bit of a straw man. He writes about WellPoint, the biggest private health insurer in the country, cutting health benefits for its own employees: If our biggest private [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 09, 2009, 3:33pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Good WSJ Story on the Wall Street-Subprime Nexus

    The Wall Street Journal has a good scoop on a story showing the connection of Wall Street to the shadier parts of the subprime industry. It reports on a settlement between mom-and-pop investors, who got snowed into lending to a company called American Business Financial Services Inc., and J.P. [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:20am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Friday Links: A Contrite Banker, Pay to Play, Gutting SOX

    Bloomberg finds a contrite banker, John Reed the former CEO of Citigroup who merged it with Sandy Weill's Travelers in the late 1990s to create a financial supermarket, one that a decade later would have the distinction of being a third-owned by Uncle Sam. Reed calls for the reinstatement [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 06, 2009, 8:06pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Dow Jones on the Paper-It-Over Economy

    Dow Jones Newswires breaks an excellent story on Wells Fargo's efforts to delay its day of reckoning on billions and billions of more mortgage losses, these in ready-to-implode option-ARMs Wells inherited when it bought Wachovia, which inherited them when it bought Golden West, which pioneered the disastrous concept of [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 06, 2009, 3:22pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • WSJ Spotlight Helps Get Results on Antitrust

    The Wall Street Journal follows up this morning on its report on CVS Caremark's business practices six months ago. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the company's doings, which the Journal in May reported include blatantly anticompetitive stuff like raising co-pays for people who shop at non-CVS pharmacies. Caremark [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 06, 2009, 10:45am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Trivial Pursuit at ProPublica

    There is a journalistic school of thought emerging, I fear, that holds that because you went to the trouble of investigating something you publish, whether you find anything worthwhile or not. This comes to mind after reading a piece by ProPublica on supposed waste in government stimulus spending. Stimulus [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 06, 2009, 9:32am EST by Dean Starkman
  • Thursday Links: Goldie's Gall, Chait Check, FSA

    The Wall Street Journal reported a couple of days ago that Goldman Sachs (an Audit funder) is trying to buy tax credits from Fannie Mae to offset its profits. Take it from here, Floyd Norris: Goldman, you may recall, was saved with taxpayer money when the panic spread last [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 05, 2009, 6:33pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Regulation: Cool, At Last

    We appreciate the bizpress?s newfound attention to Washington political fights over regulatory and economic policy, and we?re not afraid to say so. Before the crash, as we?ve also said, the Wall Street and Washington press corps might as well have existed on different planets, so little did one understand [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 05, 2009, 12:15pm EST by Dean Starkman
  • Bloomberg Examines the Bank Lobby's Armor

    Bloomberg spotlights the Consumer Financial Protection Act and uses it as a jumping-off point for a smart story on the state of the finance-lobby's might. The theme is that the financial industry is still awfully powerful but—and this is a new thing—not all-powerful anymore, particularly when it comes to [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 05, 2009, 10:25am EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Wednesday Links: Ad Comps, Recovery Engine, Coming Crash

    The Wall Street Journal's Nat Worden makes the obvious point—one missed by some, including, apparently, lots of investors—that any potential newspaper recovery depends on print advertising not continuing to decline at 25 percent-plus clips. "Newspaper publishers are running out of costs to cut, and they need to show some [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 04, 2009, 6:50pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • McClatchy: Goldman Laid Down with Dogs

    Dean Starkman has been applauding McClatchy's series on Goldman Sachs (an Audit funder) for a couple of days now. Add another Audit appreciation today. McClatchy has been doing what Dean has been calling for for a long time now: Looking much more closely at how Wall Street fueled the [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 04, 2009, 2:10pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • Bloomberg: Moneychangers in the Temples

    Bloomberg notices that three prominent bankers in recent weeks have taken to UK churches to make the case that they're not evil. Really, they did that. The moneychangers/temple headlines write themselves (see above), but Bloomberg being Bloomberg, it goes with its house brand of quirkiness, which in this case [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 04, 2009, 12:19pm EST by Ryan Chittum
  • The WSJ's 3% Solution

    A Journal story this morning reports that a White House claim that the stimulus bill saved or created 640,000 jobs is overstated. The number of jobs the Obama administration credits to federal stimulus money could be overstated by at least 20,000 of the 640,000 claimed, a Wall Street Journal [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 04, 2009, 7:17am EST by Dean Starkman
  • Times Maintains Consumer Credit Drumbeat

    The Times has done a really nice job exploring dubious practices in the credit-card industry, not to mention efforts to reform it. These are all subjects close to my heart. Today it has a new installment in its ?Card Game? series with Frontline, this one on the sneaky ways [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 03, 2009, 11:15am EST by Dean Starkman
  • Foxy Headines in the New Journal

    The Murdoch Street Journal has been a slow-motion overhaul, and it takes a minute sometimes to realize that things you skim over today would never have appeared a couple of years ago. ?State Death Taxes Are the Latest Worry? ?Death tax? isn?t a neutral word so it shouldn?t be [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 03, 2009, 9:09am EST by Dean Starkman
  • As Goldman Turns

    For my money, McClatchy?s Goldman series remains the best show these days on business-press Broadway. It?s sort of the ?Masterpiece Theater? to Matt Taibbi?s ?Monty Python?s Flying Circus.? In previous episodes, Goldman is seen selling defective securities while shorting them at the same time and chasing harried jewelry entrepreneurs [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 03, 2009, 8:26am EST by Dean Starkman
  • US Banker on Bank Rescues: "all so hit or miss."

    Speaking of tick-tocks, and I recently was, American Banker's US Banker magazine just published a credible entry on the bank-rescue follies of the fall of 2008 by Jeff Horwitz, who wrote it as a school project upstairs in the Journalism School. Good for him and the school. The minute-by-minute, [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 02, 2009, 2:47pm EST by Dean Starkman
  • Carr Has a Point about Business News In the Dumps

    David Carr looks at the business press and sees a connection between staffing cuts at business news outlets and the diminished standing of businessmen, and business in general, in the eyes of the public. He says it's more than just the economics of the media industry. But it isn?t [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 02, 2009, 10:11am EST by Dean Starkman
  • McClatchy Tightens Ties Between Goldman and Predatory Lenders

    McClatchy is running a big series on Goldman Sachs that does what other business news organizations have so far failed to do: start from scratch and reexamine where the big bank fits into the mortgage crisis. (Not that it's a bad thing, but in contrast, the Journal sticks to [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: November 02, 2009, 7:33am EST by Dean Starkman
  • Friday Links: Pearlstein's Fairy Tale, WSJ's Results, Galleon

    Steven Pearlstein has an excellent column in the Washington Post today explaining the problem with Wall Street compensation policies for the layman. Most times these explainers or arguments are too complicated and esoteric, which works in the Street's favor. — The Wall Street Journal gets results on some of [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 30, 2009, 3:57pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • On a Diet on the Second Front

    Here's a good example of the Murdoch-era Wall Street Journal short-arming a potentially interesting story. The paper reports on B1 that despite its 29 percent unemployment, Detroit's gambling parlors are doing A-okay. But rather than explore the implications through a reported feature, we're offered thin gruel. Don't blame the [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 30, 2009, 3:22pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • A Bureau Where They Reported Stories to Death

    The hue, cry and gnashing of teeth over News Corp.'s takeover of The Wall Street Journal's parent a couple of years ago mystified a lot of people, many of whom wondered what was so great about the paper that it had to be preserved in amber forever? They had [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 30, 2009, 12:11pm EDT by Dean Starkman
  • An Excellent NYT Column on Financialization

    Every writer knows the feeling of reading something you wish you'd written yourself. That's what I got with Floyd Norris's column today on why the financial industry pay is so huge and what to do about it. For one, rather than try to whack the mole, something we've been [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 30, 2009, 11:26am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Newspapers Get the Slate Treatment

    Slate got extra contrary last night, talking up the newspaper biz in a piece headlined "Newspapers aren't doing as badly as you think." To which I can only say: Have you picked one up lately? The industry hasn't been gutting newsrooms and newsholes just for the heck of it. [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 29, 2009, 5:24pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Following AIG and Goldman: the Friedman case

    Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal are doing a good job of ignoring the unhelpful business press convention of not revisiting older stories and returning to the scene of the extraordinary AIG bailout. The Journal's Liam Pleven reports this morning that AIG is now getting back some of the [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 29, 2009, 1:00pm EDT by Dean Starkman
  • The Colour of Galleon's Money

    Here's one of those strange stories that could be one that blows a story wide open or one that blows over quickly. Hard to tell. The Financial Times's Henny Sender writes that the Galleon hedge fund, which collapsed amidst recent insider-trading charges, "paid banks 'millions' for edge" as the [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 29, 2009, 11:24am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Wednesday Links: Cable Bluster, Night School, Footnotes First

    What was CNN doing having sports journalist Stephen A. Smith on to debate Times business wunderkind Andrew Ross Sorkin on Wall Street compensation practices? I'm all for having new, outside voices in the arena (so to speak), and we've criticized Sorkin a couple of times for toeing the Wall [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 28, 2009, 7:17pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Hard Truths on Social Security from Leonhardt

    The New York Times's David Leonhardt has a smart column this morning on the administration's skewed spending priorities. By spelling out why they're skewed, he gives some insight into what's wrong with the economy more broadly. Specifically, he looks at what's wrong with the Obama administration's recent proposal to [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 28, 2009, 5:35pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • WSJ's Clean Galleon Get

    There's nothing quite like a clean scoop of a delicate nature on a major story of global interest. But that's what the Journal's Robert Guth and Don Clark pulled off early this morning when they named Hector Ruiz, the former head of chip giant Advanced Micro Devices, as an [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 28, 2009, 3:31pm EDT by Dean Starkman
  • Rhetoric and Reality on Pay

    The Wall Street Journal has a nice analysis on pay czar Kenneth Feinberg's plan to restrict compensation at seven corporate-welfare cases, finding that in fact base pay will rise—sometimes sharply. But it makes a bit too much hay out of its findings. WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray says [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 28, 2009, 11:08am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Tuesday Links: Circulation, Mouthpieces, Galleon

    One of the critical questions for what remains of the newspaper industry's near-to-medium-term future is how much of the recent circulation collapse has been intentional. Newspaper companies spun the news yesterday that the huge falls were part of a strategy to cull unprofitable circulation and focus on core readers. [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 27, 2009, 8:17pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Seattle Times Reviews WaMu, Hometown Predator

    Hats off to The Seattle Times for an excellent two-part series investigating the demise of Washington Mutual, onetime hometown hero turned zero (literally). The paper calls a spade a spade here, writing (emphasis mine) "In short, WaMu became one of the nation's biggest predatory lenders." Hey, better late than [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 27, 2009, 5:42pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Another Totemic Story in the WSJ

    I was sent up there to cover the Hot Rod & Custom Car show by the New York Herald Tribune, and I brought back exactly the kind of story and of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with. A totem newspaper is the kind people [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 27, 2009, 12:22pm EDT by Dean Starkman
  • Bloomberg on AIG as Banks' Backdoor Bailout

    Bloomberg has an important story today on the bailout of the banks through AIG. Estimating that an essentially bankrupt company like AIG could have shaved 40 percent off what it owed big banks like Societe Generale and Goldman Sachs (an Audit funder), Bloomberg says the New York Fed's decision [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 27, 2009, 11:05am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Monday Links: Circ Collapse, Main Street, Patriots

    At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld digs into the catastrophic newspaper numbers. Every six month increment for (weekday) newspaper circulation has gotten worse than the one before it. The latest: a 10.6 percent plunge from the year-earlier six-month period. The previous three ABC reports: weekday declines of 7.1 [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 26, 2009, 8:46pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • NYT Goes A1 on TBTF

    Too big to fail makes the front page of The New York Times this morning, which reports that Congress, specifically Barney Frank, is toughening up the administration's plan to deal with the problem. Specifically, it gets the scoop that the legislation will "make it easier for the government to [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 26, 2009, 5:19pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Only One to Charge Online, Only One to Gain Paying Customers

    Congratulations to The Wall Street Journal, which now reclaims the title, held by USA Today for years, of the nation's highest circulation newspaper, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, as reported by Editor & Publisher. Also, props to it for having the gall to charge for its paper [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 26, 2009, 11:15am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • WSJ: New Banking Sheriff in Town, Again

    The Journal this morning offers a classic beat-sweetener, a profile of a tough new banking regulator appointed to clean up the terrible mess created by the lax old banking regulator about whom readers weren't, um, told at the time, but, who, now, in his laxity, can be exposed, if [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 26, 2009, 10:50am EDT by Dean Starkman
  • About Those Chamber of Commerce "Members"

    Our Greg Marx does a good job looking at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce member-count dispute, which has laid bare that the press has accidentally helped mislead readers for years on the lobbying group's size. Three million or 300,000? Think small (360,000 now). A buddy and I were talking [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 26, 2009, 9:52am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Friday Links: Foreboding, Cell-less, anti-Moores

    The FT's Gillian Tett feels a "sense of foreboding" about the current "rally fueled by cheap money," otherwise known as a bubble. She says "it is crystal clear that the longer that money remains ultra cheap, the more traders will have an incentive to gamble (particularly if they privately [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 23, 2009, 7:11pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Much Ado About Not Much on Pay

    Wall Street pay has been all over the news the last couple of days, leading the Journal and the Times and the like, though it looks like a bunch of noise to this observer—moves that are more like political PR ploys than anything of lasting consequence. Joe Nocera feels [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 23, 2009, 6:43pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Cornerbacks and WSJ Editorial Writers

    Moreover, some of the Senators seem worried that repealing Glass-Steagall might open up markets to terrible and maybe unforeseen risks. That's a natural fear among folks who were mostly out of school decades before modern financial instruments appeared on the scene. It might not be a bad idea, in [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 23, 2009, 5:00pm EDT by Dean Starkman
  • Making Honest Choices at Fortune

    The granddaddy of business magazines says it's cutting the number of issues per year to 18 from 25, in anticipation of staff cuts both at Fortune and later across Time Inc., The Wall Street Journal's Shira Ovide reports this morning. Nothing good there, but I found a glimmer of [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 23, 2009, 11:10am EDT by Dean Starkman
  • The High Bubble Era in Retrospect

    "A growing family with a lot of debt. A young couple with no down payment. A business owner whose income was hard to document. Every one of them was turned down for a home loan by three different lenders. I'm with Countrywide and I got them all approved." [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 23, 2009, 10:36am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Thursday Links: BW's History, Lipman?, Job Scramble

    Mediaite has a swell feature on BusinessWeek covers through the decades, from the days when it was called The Business Week, to the economic thermometer days, to recent winning covers. Watch how business has changed in a few short minutes. There are some good ones, including "National Defense Rewrites [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 22, 2009, 8:09pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Goodwill Hunting at BusinessWeek

    BusinessWeek has an interesting piece on the accounting funny business companies employ to smooth out their earnings or to patch their leaky balance sheets. Culprit No. 1, unsurprisingly, goodwill, which is an intangible asset booked in mergers and acquisitions that BW points out evaporates in downturns, but whose nebulous [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 22, 2009, 5:19pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Circulation Surpasses Ad Revenue at NYT

    Back in July, The Audit noted that a big shift had happened in the news business. Circulation revenue was growing while advertising revenue plummeted, skewing historic revenue ratios and, perhaps, pointing the way to a new model for the news. Particularly stunning was the calculation that The New York [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 22, 2009, 11:31am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Wednesday Links: "Read and Weep," Break Up, WSJ Excuses

    Uh oh, Bank of America. Some pretty damning emails leaked out of Congress yesterday about what BofA executives knew about Merrill's massive losses several weeks before the shareholder vote was held before that information was released. "Read and weep" wrote the chief accounting officer in an email in early [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 21, 2009, 9:40pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • WaPo on Hard Times in Bank City USA

    The Washington Post has a very good story on the fall of Charlotte's once-mighty banking industry and the impact on the city. Charlotte's the epicenter for this kind of thing, what with Wachovia's exit and Bank of America's new status as ward of the state, but the Post is [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 21, 2009, 8:20pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Twitter, Facebook Get Paid. What About the Press?

    So Microsoft's Bing search engine is going to pay Twitter and Facebook to have their users' posts show up in Bing's search results, reports All Things Digital. It's unclear if that means Twitter will remove tweets from Google unless it pays up. But that's what it looks like: Twitter [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 21, 2009, 2:52pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Sorkin's Major Scoops on the Goldman/Paulson Nexus

    Felix Salmon has been digging some choice nuggets out of Andrew Ross Sorkin's huge new book "Too Big to Fail." Yesterday, Salmon blogged about a secret meeting Sorkin reports between the entire board of directors of Goldman Sachs (one of The Audit's funders) and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—in Moscow, [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 21, 2009, 2:10pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • NYT Takes on Obama's Volcker Exile

    Why won't the Obama administration listen to its most credible economic adviser? That's the question—and it's an essential one— asked by The New York Times this morning on page one. The adviser, of course, is Paul Volcker (I'm guessing you knew the most credible wasn't Larry Summers or Tim [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 21, 2009, 11:16am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Tuesday Links: Insiders, Preemption, iPhone Mags

    The Journal floods the zone on the big hedge-fund insider-trading story. It goes page one with a report noting a run on the fund, a Sri Lanka-datelined story on how that country's stock market tumbled on the arrest of Raj Rajaratnam, its ex-pat and biggest investor, and a look [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 20, 2009, 8:32pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Live-Blogging the Corporate Press Release

    Live-blogging is a relatively new responsibility in the journalist's job description—which now includes regular blogging, picture-taking, Web video, Twitter, live chats, TV appearances, podcasts, BlackBerrying, answering commenters on your story, and perhaps a bit of old-fashioned reporting and writing if that can be squeezed in. All (sort of) joking [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 20, 2009, 7:51pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Incurred on the Street: Windfall Tax on Bankers?

    I've been wondering when the taxation solution would pop up in the financial press regarding the record bonuses Wall Street is set to pay out this year. Today it does—in The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column, of all places. Simon Nixon writes: This year's bank profits [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 20, 2009, 3:42pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • The Post Gets Perky on Bailout-Bank Pay

    The Washington Post spotlights this morning a somewhat-overlooked (this year, anyway) compensation aspect of our corporate-welfare kingpins: perks. These are the kinds of things that can really get people riled up because they're a bit easier to wrap your head around than the $700,000 the average Goldman Sachs employee [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 20, 2009, 10:57am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Monday Links: Foreclosure Homeless, NYT Cuts, Fed Up?

    — The New York Times profiles a one-time homeless-shelter operator who now lives in one. It says the number of people in homeless shelters because of foreclosures is on the rise, but the numbers are pretty sketchy and sourced to advocates, though there's probably no getting around that. — [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 19, 2009, 8:20pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • The New Compact for Workers: No Compact at All

    The Wall Street Journal has a good page-one look at big-picture changes in the workforce—ones that have been going on for some time, but have been worsened by the deep recession. Specifically, companies have long been shifting the risk of retirement onto their workers through 401(k)s and the like, [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 19, 2009, 5:40pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • WSJ: Plastic Fees Under the Microscope

    The Wall Street Journal keeps the spotlight on banking industry rent-seeking, looking at the increased pressure it finds itself under on interchange fees, the 2 percent it reaps off every swipe of plastic. The press has aimed what's left of its cannons at the $30 billion (okay, $27 billion) [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 19, 2009, 11:27am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • McClatchy Advances the Ball on Moody's

    Many people feel the rating agencies haven't gotten enough attention, given their linchpin role in the crisis. I tend to agree, even as we've noted and appreciated excellent work over the past couple years, including by the Times's Gretchen Morgenson, Bloomberg's Mark Pittman and Jon Weil, the WSJ's Aaron [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 19, 2009, 10:30am EDT by Dean Starkman
  • Friday Links: EPA Enforcers, Chamber, Foreclosures Soar

    The New York Times's investigative series on polluted water continued to get results. The EPA says it will overhaul its enforcement of the Clean Water Act, meaning it says it will actually enforce it. — Steven Pearlstein looks at the tarnishing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in recent [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 16, 2009, 7:45pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Greenspan Joins the Too-Big-to-Fail Fight

    Alan Greenspan has had his legacy forever tarnished by the financial crisis, the conditions for which it's almost unanimously agreed were created or at least ignored by him. We once knew Greenspan as the Randian free-market fundamentalist he was for nearly two decades as chairman of the Federal Reserve. [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 16, 2009, 6:19pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Good Goldman Question From Zero Hedge

    Seems reasonable to me: "What Is The Rationale Behind The SEC's Hiring A 29 Year Old Goldmanite As Its COO?" While one may or may not have feelings about Goldman's tentacled capture of various regulatory agencies, the most recent news out of the SEC that it would be hiring [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 16, 2009, 3:20pm EDT by Dean Starkman
  • LA Times on the Upside of the Falling Dollar

    I like this Los Angeles Times story this morning reporting why the falling dollar might be good for the country—something that's counterintuitive if you read much of the press. And there are serious tradeoffs. But, speaking of trade, the weak buck is helping to reduce our enormous trade deficit. [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 16, 2009, 1:49pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Reporting the CFPA Legislation

    The New York Times leads its coverage of the financial-reform legislation with the news that the House Financial Services Committee gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Act by exempting all non-ginormous banks from the agency's oversight. Reporter Stephen Labaton emphasizes the right stuff here, pointing out in his lede that [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 16, 2009, 11:17am EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • WSJ, Times at Odds on Citi Earnings

    I'm sure this is much more a function of the unholy mess that is Citigroup's income statement—many a journalistic braincell was no doubt destroyed yesterday trying to figure whether the bank actually turned a profit—but two leading financial outlets say different things about how well Citi's trading operations did. [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 16, 2009, 10:00am EDT by Dean Starkman
  • Thursday Links: Dow 7,714, Student Loan Bailout, Lobbyists

    David Weidner has a good take on Dow 10,000 (Part XXVI), emphasizing it represents a "lost decade of stock investing." He points out that, counting inflation, you'd need a 72 percent jump in the broader S&P 500 index to get to even with the end of 1999 (that doesn't [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 15, 2009, 8:42pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
  • Nieman, Galbraith on the Power Problem

    Nieman Watchdog asks "Where's the reporting on the fraud that led to the crash?" Funny, The Audit, and especially Audit Lead Prosecutor Dean Starkman, has been wondering that for a long while now. John Hanrahan writes that economist James Galbraith of—I can barely bring myself to write this on [...]

     Permalink
    Posted: October 15, 2009, 5:51pm EDT by Ryan Chittum
1 2 3 ... 13
Medill- the real world of Journalism learning
Poynter Careers
More media jobs