Category Archives: Media

Sorkin Exonerates Fuld

Andrew Ross Sorkin today has the most astonishing parenthetical I’ve seen in a long while: (By the way, doesn’t it seem increasingly hard to vilify Richard S. Fuld Jr., the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, given what’s happened since … Continue reading

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How the New York Times Can Thrive Without Profits

Tunku Varadarajan says that newspapers are indeed businesses, and says that "the media business is just as vulnerable to the pressures of impatient capital as are other sorts of business". I’m not sure if that’s true, actually: it seems to … Continue reading

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The WSJ Rewrites History

Fancy some time travel? Go back to my blog entry about John Thain from January 22, and click on the first link. I promise I haven’t edited it. Amazingly, despite the fact that I was linking to a story on … Continue reading

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US News’s Doomed Subscription PDF

Jeff has the news today that US News is launching a $19.95-per-year weekly PDF. The decision comes almost exactly ten years after Slate went free, after a disastrous attempt to charge $19.95 a year for its content: Bill Bass, an … Continue reading

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How Not to Fix the New York Times

When Michael Hirschorn talks nonsense about the New York Times, it’s silly, but at least it’s understood that he’s not a stock analyst by trading, and that he’s more interested in making waves than being helpful. Henry Blodget, by contrast, … Continue reading

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Newspaper Datapoint of the Day

From Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: The $5.6bn Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp paid in 2007 for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal and several local papers, would now be sufficient to buy Gannett, the New York Times, McClatchy, Media General, Belo … Continue reading

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Spot the Blogger

My first appearance on CNBC happened to coincide with the single most important event of the century: Bernie Madoff getting out of a car. So there wasn’t much time to talk about anything substantive, although I did try to chide … Continue reading

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Financial Crisis: The Word Count

Dear John Thain has a wonderful list of a bunch of the Must-Read Articles that Important Publications have written about the financial crisis. He reckons he really should get around to reading them some time; the scary thing, for me, … Continue reading

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Google and Newspapers

No, Google’s not going to buy the New York Times. But its CEO, Eric Schmidt, says it might come close: I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term … Continue reading

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Why the New York Times Won’t Cease Printing

The end of the world is nigh! Or the end of the print edition of the NYT, anyway, at least according to Michael Hirschorn, in a piece which has been generally well-received by a blogosphere. For me, however, the article … Continue reading

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Tribune Implosion Datapoint of the Day

How low can recovery rates go? Today the CDS auction on Tribune’s defaulted bonds settled at 1.5 cents on the dollar, which is low but in line with expectations of bondholders essentially getting nothing once the secured creditors have been … Continue reading

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Newspaper Economics

Jim Surowiecki’s column on newspapers is a good one, especially when he talks about the drop-off in advertising revenues and newspapers’ failure in the online space. I have to take issue with this, however: People don’t use the Times less … Continue reading

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The Goldman Munipal Conflict Non-Story Refuses to Die

Remember the silly ProPublica report about alleged Goldman Sachs conflicts of interest in California? ProPublica subsequently took its act on the road, and used exactly the same Goldman report to produce an almost-identical article about New Jersey, in the Newark … Continue reading

Posted in banking, journalism, Media, Politics | 3 Comments

Zell’s Not Smiling

On April 3, 2007, Sam Zell was triumphant. The headline in the WSJ was "Zell Wins Tribune In Bid to Revive A Media Empire", and the story was accompanied by a dot portrait of a happy, smiling grave-dancer. Today, the … Continue reading

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When Newspapers Get Lazy

The wsj.com home page today features, prominently, an article on fund manager Ken Heebner, who’s long bank stocks, and I can’t for the life of me work out what it’s doing there. Heebner was a media star back when he … Continue reading

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External Links on the NYT Home Page

Times Extra has launched, and it’s even less impressive than I’d feared it would be. This is not, by a long shot, the ideal newspaper site, which leads with its own content where that’s strong and which links to the … Continue reading

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Great Moments in Corporate Sponsorship, GM Edition

The Onion News Network has a video up headlined "In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?". It’s sponsored by Saab, a wholly-owned subsidiary of General Motors.

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The FT.com Redesign

The FT.com redesign isn’t live yet, but you can get a preview here. It has a lot more white (or, rather, pink) space than before, and places a huge onus on the front-page editors to get the story mix exactly … Continue reading

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The WSJ Breaks the External-Link Taboo

Many congratulations to the Wall Street Journal! Here’s a little bit of today’s WSJ.com front page — you can click on the picture for a big screencap of the full front page. The important thing here is the second link, … Continue reading

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Media Buy Datapoint of the Day

How much is Barack Obama paying to blanket the networks with a half-hour TV buy during prime time this evening? Would you believe about the same amount as it costs to buy 30 seconds of airtime during the Superbowl? According … Continue reading

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Quote of the Day: Rupert’s Surprise

Michael Wolff on how Rupert Murdoch discovered there was more to Dow Jones than just the WSJ: I don’t believe he had any idea there was an enterprise side of the business. I believe I was the one to explain … Continue reading

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The WSJ’s Subscription Model

I’m at the Future of Business Media conference, where the wifi is painfully slow and where Robert Thomson, the editor of the WSJ, spoke this morning. He spent some time addressing the subject of whether wsj.com should be free, and … Continue reading

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Surowiecki, Blogger

O frabjous day! Jim Surowiecki now has a blog! It’s called The Balance Sheet, and he put up no fewer than six entries yesterday alone. The RSS feed is here: go add it to your feed reader now.

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CNBC’s Gasparino Problem

Charlie Gasparino has outdone himself today. He reasonably blames much of the current financial crisis on "a lack of leadership from Washington" — but somehow manages to convince himself that it’s Obama’s leadership which is lacking, rather than Paulson’s or … Continue reading

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Great Moments in Punditry, Kudlow Edition

Larry Kudlow, July 2007: If you ask folks on Wall Street what their biggest worry is, most will say it’s another 9-11. They rank another attack far ahead of passing sub-prime mortgage problems or wiggles in consumer spending… I have … Continue reading

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