Felix Salmon

Who’s afraid of cannibals? News executives are: there’s a pervasive attitude in the media industry that if you give your content away for free in one place, then people won’t pay for it somewhere else. On this view, if a newspaper loses circulation and has a free website, then the circulation loss can be attributed not to the infinite and wonderful world of other free information available online, but just to the fact that the newspaper’s own content is available online.

This mindset has helped to hobble the online expansion of hundreds of media properties, even when there’s precious little empirical evidence to suggest that it’s based in reality. In fact, the opposite is true: Tyler Green has a fantastic post looking at museum memberships, showing that they generally increased after museums moved to free admission. Economically, that doesn’t make sense, insofar as people buy memberships to save on the cost of repeat visits to the museum. But maybe that’s not the main reason people buy memberships — or maybe people don’t always act in an economically rational way.

A similar economically-literalist mindset exists on the digital advertising side of things: Kendall Allen calls it the “math state,” where everything gets measured and auctioned and quantified, and geeks rise up the greasy pole while creatives find themselves increasingly marginalized.

Today marks an important point in the evolution of digital media: the new iPad app for the New Yorker allows for subscriptions (rather than just per-issue sales), and what’s more allows existing print subscribers to read the magazine on their iPads at no extra cost. I was doing that on the subway this morning, and from an ad-impressions standpoint it’s quite clever. You don’t just scroll a long page to read each story: instead, each piece is paginated, and occasionally the route to the next page is interrupted by an ad. The third page of Anthony Lane’s piece on Pixar, for example, is a Movado ad, while the seventh page is for Castello cheese.

The ads look great on the iPad: even if they’re not clever interactive rich-media things, they still glow in hi-res glory, filling the screen and grabbing attention in a way that banner ads on websites can’t really compete with. If I was an advertiser buying a full-page ad in the magazine, I’d be more than happy to accept this kind of thing as an alternative way of getting my message across. Especially since people who download an issue on their iPad are more likely to read it than print subscribers with a teetering bedside pile of unread New Yorkers growing by the week.

But of course advertisers and media buyers are dragging their feet on this: David Carr quotes MediaVest’s Robin Steinberg as saying that an iPad reader should not simply be considered equivalent to a reader of the paper magazine; Carr’s clear that she wants iPad pricing to be closer to bargain-basement web prices than to premium print prices.

I don’t think that’s really constructive. Magazines economics are based on the institution of the “rate base,” a circulation number guaranteed by the publisher to its advertisers. A digital edition downloaded by an iPad subscriber can and should be considered pari passu to a paper edition, for such purposes — that’s the easy and elegant solution to an otherwise very hard-to-measure problem of how to charge for access to the upscale and desirable iPad audience. iPad ads are no less glossy than their print counterparts, and are even harder to ignore. So let’s hope that advertisers will get out of their math state, and instead embrace a digital world where they can beef up their print buys with exciting and creative implementations for the iPad.

The more that both publishers and advertisers concentrate on the creative side of things, and the less they worry about the distractions of granular economics, the more successful both are likely to be. Digital display and brand advertising is still very young. Let’s nurture it without giving too much authority to the bean counters. If they stifle it now, they’ll end up suffocating the very digital publishers that they’re going to need, in future, as print slowly dies and consumption moves to tablets.

The NYT employs some of the smartest and ablest users and analysts of social media: it’s probably the most sophisticated newspaper in America on that front. And then it has dinosaurs like Bill Keller and Arthur Brisbane, whose respective columns this weekend betray the fact that the people with the bully pulpits are stuck in a completely different world, seemingly ignorant of some of the biggest stories in social media.

Brisbane is the NYT’s ombudsman, and today he describes the way that the paper broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Well, he can’t do that, because the NYT didn’t break the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. But he ignores the people who did break the news, and just tells the story of how the official NYT machine worked. His story starts at 10:34 last Sunday night, when a source told NYT reporter Helene Cooper that Osama had been killed. By 10:40, an alert was up on nytimes.com. Then, by Brisbane’s account, Twitter got involved:

One minute after Ms. Cooper’s news alert was posted on the Web, Jeff Zeleny, The Times’s national political correspondent, posted on Twitter: “NYT’s Helene Cooper confirming that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. President to announce shortly from the White House.”

At virtually the same time, Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor, sent a similar Twitter message. Next to come was an automated Twitter post generated by NYTimes.com, regurgitating the original news alert.

Those links are all Brisbane’s, by the way, including the rather hilarious link to the homepage of the very site his column is on. All of the links are internal; none are to the actual tweets in question. But here’s the first tweet that Brisbane mentions, from Zeleny. As Brisbane says, it was posted at 10:41pm.

For a very different look at how the Osama news broke check out SocialFlow’s exhaustive analysis of 14.8 million tweets on Sunday night. As far as Twitter is concerned, the news was broken by Keith Urbahn at 10:24pm. But it really got momentum from being retweeted at 10:25pm by NYT media reporter Brian Stelter, who added the crucial information that Urbahn is Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. Urbahn, here, gets the goal, but Stelter absolutely gets the assist:

Stelter’s 55,000 followers are extremely influential people in the US media scene, and until Monday’s physical newspaper started landing on subscribers’ doorsteps, Stelter’s tweets were the single most important thing that the NYT published on Osama. Note the timing here: at 10:34pm, when Cooper still thought that Osama had been captured, Stelter had already retweeted Urbahn; had then tweeted that “the whispers about bin Laden are getting louder in Washington circles”; and had then come out with a pretty definitive third tweet, at 10:33pm:

How come Brisbane is ignoring all this? Stelter was way ahead of the rest of the NYT, but Brisbane incomprehensibly discounts his excellent work. That might be because he doesn’t consider tweeting to be part of a NYT reporter’s job; it might be because he doesn’t consider retweeting to be reporting. But Brian Stelter is a prime example proving that neither is true. Brisbane should have taken this opportunity to congratulate Stelter on a job extremely well done. Instead, he is completely overlooked, in favor of tweets from Zeleny and Roberts which came out more than a quarter of an hour after Stelter had publicly jumped onto the case. Which, of course, is an eternity in the twittersphere.

Meanwhile, Bill Keller, the NYT’s editor, has devoted his magazine column to the subject of the newspaper’s war reporters, both staffers and freelance, who are killed or injured in combat zones. Again, anybody conversant with social media knows that there’s an important debate going on around precisely this subject — and that if the NYT doesn’t handle it well, then, in the words of Paddy Hirsch, it “could threaten the company’s brand”.

The debate started on Facebook, between war photographers Teru Kuwayama and Mike Kamber, who wrote a “muted eulogy” in the NYT for photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros; it then moved on to a discussion board called Lightstalkers, and although that debate seems to have disappeared for some reason, it lives on, for the time being, in Google’s cache. Meanwhile, Teru has put his side of the debate here, at Gizmodo.

Teru’s point is that the NYT spends vastly more money, effort, and resources on Americans and Europeans with names like Tim and Chris than it does on locals with names like Mohammed or Ali or Raza. Paddy puts it very well:

For years there’s been rumbling discontent among journalists about the way media organizations take pains to look after their staffers when they’re caught in the line of fire, but often fail to provide support to the locals who make it possible for those staffers to get the story.

The support those locals give is considerable and invaluable. Anyone who has ever reported overseas knows this. Most reporters who arrive in a conflict zones are like newborn babies. They can’t speak the language, they don’t know what to eat, how to find shelter, or how to get around. They are utterly vulnerable. If they’re lucky, and news people have been in-country before, they’ll have a network of support on the ground: so-called fixers, whose job, on the face of it, is to arrange interviews and get the reporter to the story.

But fixers do a lot more than that. They translate, they find safe accommodations, they know where to find gear. And batteries to power that gear. They find the least dangerous routes to drive, and then they often drive those routes. They know who can help and how to get them to provide that help. They are, in short, architects of an entire network of support for the reporter.

And providing that support is dangerous. Not just because they’re often in the line of fire with the reporter, but because they have to live in the country when the reporter’s job is over. That makes them uniquely vulnerable: if the story the reporter files is unpopular, the local will go after the fixer. If the country the reporter comes from is unpopular, the fixer is regarded as giving help to the enemy.

Fixers are vital to the creation of a good story, and therefore essential to a news organization’s coverage. Shouldn’t the news company therefore treat fixers and their ilk with the same care and attention that they provide the company’ support staff at home? That’s the argument that’s going play out in blogs and stories over the next few months. My question is, as the debate plays out in public, what should news companies do about it?

Keller, in his NYT column, wades into this debate in the most high-handed way possible. He talks at length about Hetherington and Hondros, and about other photographers, like Joao Silva, who parachute in to war zones, meet fixers, get their shots, and then move on to the next job — if they don’t get their legs blown off in the process. He writes movingly about NYT photographers Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, who were brutally treated in Libya but survived; he doesn’t mention their driver, Mohamed Shaglouf, who almost certainly didn’t.

Keller quotes his colleague Greg Marinovich as saying that “sometimes we fail our own moral compass, our own emotional compass.” It’s a resonant quote, for people following Kuwayama’s accusations that the NYT has short-changed the families of people like Raza Khan, who was killed driving Kuwayama and Lynsey Addario in Pakistan:

Raza’s family had modest hopes for compensation or support—they were hoping to get enough money to replace the used Toyota he died in so that his oldest son could carry the family business of driving for foreign journalists. In a single sentence mention, in a blog post about Addario’s recovery, the NY Times mentioned that it was “gathering a fund to give to the six children of the driver, Raza Khan, for whom he was the sole provider”. That fund seems to have amounted to about a thousand dollars, which probably as much was being spent on an hourly basis to provide red-carpet medical treatment to their American photographer, who’d broken a collarbone.

As the debate about the NYT’s responsibility to these fixers rages, Keller’s response is to ignore both it and them entirely, as though neither the debate nor the fixers even exist. Just like Brisbane, Keller makes sure that every single link in his column is an internal one, to some other NYT web page — I count 26 different links between the two columns, which implies that in the eyes of the New York Times, the 26 most important online resources to link to when writing those columns are all NYT stories or pages. It’s as arrogant as it is hermetic.

All of this has to be extremely demoralizing for people like Brian Stelter, who do great work on and with social media and who take pride in linking to news and information wherever it can be found. They’re greatly appreciated outside the company, by people like me. But inside the company, it seems, at least when it comes to the important and visible weekend columnists charged with writing about the NYT itself, anything discussed or reported outside the NYT’s own hallowed pages is probably best ignored.

Eric Savitz has this fascinating table, showing Experian’s estimates of traffic to various news sites on Monday:

Yahoo News is always a traffic powerhouse — it got almost 9 million visits the previous Monday. But that number trebled on May 2, to what might well be an all-time record for daily visits to a news website. If that number only includes visits to news.yahoo.com and excludes visits to the Yahoo homepage, it’s astonishing — especially when compared to Google News, which saw a relatively modest jump to less than a tenth of the Yahoo traffic.

I suspect that a large proportion of those 27 million visits came from people searching for Osama bin Laden on Google — which in turn seems to be better at driving traffic to Yahoo’s news pages than to its own. That’s as it should be: Yahoo’s news pages are better than Google’s.

At the same time, however, it’s only reasonable to assume that a significant proportion of the online population really does go straight to Yahoo News when something’s breaking. Note too the fact that four of the top six sites in the list are the online arms of TV networks, and that all of the top seven sites are either TV networks or web-native sites.

The lesson is clear: when big news breaks, people flock to TV. And when they’re online, they still flock to TV, or else they go to the main sites they think of for providing good fast web-native news. Other news sites, like NYT and WaPo, are lucky just to break into the top ten. They’re very good at what they do. But the broad population still doesn’t think of them as being real-time in the way that TV and the web are.

(Of course the Experian numbers probably differ greatly from what internal numbers show, but the assumption here is that the relative numbers are broadly true. Reuters.com registered more than 2.8 million visits on Monday, compared to about a million from the week before.)

I’m not impressed with the fiscal reporting of John McKinnon, whose WSJ story, headlined “High-Earning Households Pay Growing Share of Taxes”, appears in the paper’s ostensibly impartial news pages, as opposed to its wing-nut editorial page. Here’s the lede:

As President Barack Obama pushes to raise income taxes on high earners, opponents are seizing on data that indicates these U.S. households already pay a large and growing share of taxes, even compared with high-tax European countries.

The context is clearly laid out in the opening words: the big debate on income taxes which is going on right now between the White House, which is pushing — um, hang on a sec. What debate? What push? As far as I can tell, President Barack Obama is engaged in quite a large number of fiscal debates at the moment, not least the one surrounding the debt ceiling and how he can persuade Congress to raise it. But there’s rather a large difference between the debt ceiling, on the one hand, and “income taxes on high earners”, on the other.

After all, it’s only a few months since President Barack Obama extended the Bush tax cuts on people earning more than $250,000 a year, saying that doing so was “a win for American families, American businesses and our economic recovery”. As far as I can tell, he has evinced no desire whatsoever to reopen that particular can of worms since then.

So what’s McKinnon talking about when he says that Obama is pushing to raise income taxes on high earners? A link would help, but McKinnon seems to be allergic to links. The story is peppered with references to primary documents — the second sentence, for instance, refers to “a new congressional study” showing that most US households paid no federal income tax in 2009. But there’s no link to that study. Maybe because it’s not really a study at all: McKinnon is just talking about a memo from the Joint Committee on Taxation which would easily fit on a single page if it wasn’t for the size of the letterhead. And far from being a formal study, in fact it’s just a “backcast” — a forecast of what the 2009 numbers are likely to show when the final data arrives.

The WSJ then puts together this graph, with its “heavier burden” headline:

The first thing to notice is that this is one of those charts where the top is a straight line — we’re looking at the percentage of the total tax base, not at total taxes. What happens in these charts has nothing to do with whether taxes are going up or going down. (In fact, of course, thanks to the Bush tax cuts and to the recession, they’ve been going down for a while.) Insofar as the richest Americans are paying a higher share of taxes, then, they’re just contributing a larger slice to a smaller tax-collection pie. But there’s no way you can tell that from these charts.

The big picture, when it comes to taxes, is that we’re not paying enough of them. Government expenditures are high and are set to rise substantially in coming years, thanks to healthcare cost inflation and an aging population. Meanwhile tax revenues aren’t nearly enough to cover those expenditures. So they have to go up.

If the European countries that McKinnon is talking about cut their federal tax burden to less than 15% of GDP, I’m sure that they would look more progressive too. But instead they have taxes, like nationwide sales taxes, which increase the total national tax burden but which are also regressive. It’s easy to make your tax system look progressive when you’re only raising a relatively small sum in taxes. But that’s a point which McKinnon never makes. And obvious factual points about the limitations of the income-tax factoid are turned into partisan talking points:

As for those Americans who pay no federal income tax, most of them still pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes that can take a significant share of their income, Democrats said.

There’s absolutely no need for the “Democrats said” appended to that sentence — unless you want to cast sly doubt on the assertion, which is entirely true and uncontroversial.

Meanwhile, McKinnon’s bikini statistics (what they reveal is less interesting than what they conceal) are presented as simple fact, rather than being attributed to Republicans:

Upper-income taxpayers have paid a growing share of the federal tax burden over the last 25 years.

A 2008 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, found that the highest-earning 10% of the U.S. population paid the largest share among 24 countries examined, even after adjusting for their relatively higher incomes. “Taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States,” the OECD study concluded.

Meanwhile, the percentage of U.S. households paying no federal income tax has been climbing, and reached 51% for 2009, according to a new analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Again, there’s no link to the OECD report, which is much longer and much more carefully hedged than McKinnon makes it sound. (The “conclusion” comes on page 104 of the 312-page publication.)

McKinnon does have a classic “to be sure” graf at the very end of his piece, quoting “some experts”:

To be sure, some experts say the share of tax borne by the wealthy is not the best measure of a system’s progressivity.

Well of course it isn’t. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped McKinnon writing a whole article based on the implicit assumption that it is. If he’s going to do that, he should at least try to make the case that metrics like the share of tax borne by the wealthy are particularly interesting or useful variables to look at. And the fact that he doesn’t is a strong hint that this article is more a parroting of Republican talking points than it is a dispassionate look at a vital matter of fiscal policy.

From an economic point of view, improvements in ad-targeting technology seem as though they’re pretty obviously Pareto-optimal: everybody benefits. Advertisers get to waste fewer of their ad dollars putting messages in front of people they don’t want to reach; publishers get to charge more money; and consumers get to see only things which are germane and relevant to them.

So why is it that many people hate ad targeting, and hate being served targeted ads?

Part of the reason, I think, is just that targeted ads are better at getting our attention than non-targeted ads — but they’re still an unwelcome distraction from whatever it is we’re wanting to read. Most of us have become pretty good at unconsciously ignoring advertising, especially online. (Often I find myself looking hard for a big special report on a website, because it’s presented on the home page in much the same way as an ad might be, and so I ignore it, in much the same way as it’s easy to miss the big letters spelling out continent names on a world map.) Every time there’s an improvement in targeted advertising, it cuts through that wall and annoys us anew before we slowly learn to ignore it over time.

But more generally and more interestingly I wonder whether what we’re seeing here is what you might call the uncanny valley of advertising.

Every so often, we get glimpses of the Holy Grail of advertising: the point at which the advertising message is so perfectly crafted and targeted for the consumer that the consumer doesn’t want to ignore it at all, and prefers it to most media output. (One common slogan found in advertising circles is “every company is a media company”.) American Express has been working this seam for a while, with its custom publishing unit; another example is Red Bull, which produces more extreme-sport content than any dedicated TV production company.

And of course we’re all used to traditional mass-market advertising, which is barely targeted at all: the 30-second spots in popular sitcoms, say, or the Netflix pop-up ads we have to clear out every so often when uncluttering our browser windows.

The former is better than the latter — but in between things get weird. Especially when the targeting is done by keyword-recognition algorithms or cookies placed on your computer by robots which track you across the internet.

You look for a pair of socks online, and then for weeks afterwards you see ads for socks popping up in the most unlikely websites. You mention Palm Springs in an status update, and suddenly ads for weekend getaways in Palm Springs start appearing in your webmail client. Or more distressingly and creepily, after sending a difficult and highly personal email to a close friend, you start seeing ads for abortion service providers.

We all naturally anthropomorphize computers at the best of times, so it’s impossible not to feel, in these cases, that we’re being spied on, and that our most private activities are really not private at all. But I think the emphasis on privacy, in these debates, is misplaced. It’s not like some individual human being out there knows something about me personally that I’d rather they didn’t. And a computer or an algorithm, of course, can’t really know anything at all. But we feel spied on and invaded, because we don’t think of activities like online shopping or social networking or emailing as things we do in public: in fact we would never want to do them in a very public way.

Eventually, advertisers will be able to get much smarter than they are right now, and the ad-serving algorithms will stop being dumb things based on keyword searches, and will start being able to construct a much more well-rounded idea of who we are and what kind of advertising we’re likely to be interested in. At that point, when the ads we see are targeted to us based on much more than the content of our emails or the goods that we shop for online, they probably won’t feel nearly as creepy or intrusive as they do now. But for the time being, a lot of people are going to continue to get freaked out by these ads, and are going to think that the answer is greater “online privacy”. When I’m not really convinced that’s the problem at all.

The Awl’s David Cho has an interesting post on web publishing today:

There’s a trend on the internet now to talk about how great you are…

The current rules in place to win at having a New York internet publishing entity are stupid and wrong, both in terms of perceived and actual success…

As far as actual success and how we are sort of too stubborn for our own good, it essentially comes down to the now standardized model that exists for how to build a large, behemoth, words-based content website. It’s sort of easy? Create a huge mountain of garbage statistics of audience and inventory, and then place a tablecloth of seemingly intelligent content to cover it like a veil. There are obviously exceptions to this model, the most exceptional, non-old publication to do this being Gawker, but when it comes to your HuffPo’s or whatever, that’s essentially the shady ass blueprint, and you know what, it works incredibly well.

If I were inclined to give Bill Keller the benefit of the doubt here — which I’m not — this is what I’d think that he was driving at with his talk of “adorable kitten videos”. Yes, there’s extremely high-quality original content on HuffPo. But there are lots of sites with high-quality original content. What differentiates HuffPo from those other sites is its sheer size: the astonishing number of pageviews it generates. And while some of those pageviews come from its page architecture, a lot of them come from pretty lowbrow content.

If you look at the most popular stories on HuffPo right now, it’s possible to find something like the screenshot at left. White stuff on a starlet’s finger, mobile homes changing hands for millions of dollars, Chain Restaurants Worth Visiting — this is all pretty much garbage content, which is very cheap to produce and which can generate enormous amounts of traffic and ad impressions.

On the other hand, if you look at the actual most popular stories on HuffPo right now — the first “most popular” page, rather than the second — it seems significantly meatier. All of them have more than ten times as many Facebook shares as those chain restaurants do, and they’re all real stories.

That said, none of these stories is HuffPo-exlusive reporting. And that’s probably what Cho is driving at — the really great content which HuffPo produces on its own is very worthy, but it’s really only a thin tablecloth compared to the mountain of cheap aggregated inventory which it produces and sells so effectively.

Now I happen to like cheap aggregated inventory. I think it serves an important and useful function — and millions of HuffPo’s readers agree with me. Still, when the thing you’re most proud of is relatively peripheral to your business but core to your self-image, there’s a disconnect which can look to outsiders somewhat hypocritical.

Truth be told, however, the NYT is not as far away from that model as Keller might like to believe. The expensive international reporting Keller’s rightly so proud of never pays for itself: it’s essentially cross-subsidized by glossy ads in T Magazine, and the neverending procession of lifestyle sections and supplements which accompany the main news section.

Here, for example, is the latest piece of journalism for the NYT by its former media reporter, Alex Kuczynski. The first thing you see when you visit that page is the photo, with a caption worth quoting in full:

INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO — With one outfit like this, you’ve got a wardrobe. Brunello Cucinelli jacket, $2,090. Call (212) 813-0900. Theory dress (worn as top), $295. Go to theory.com. The Row pants, $1,950. At Barneys New York. Call (212) 826-8900. Phineas Cole pocket square, $70. At Paul Stuart. Call (212) 682-0320. Hervé Van Der Straeten cuffs, $750 each. At Neiman Marcus. Call (888) 888-4757. Photograph by Sebastian Kim. Fashion Editor: Ethel Park. Fashion Assistant: Adam Ballheim. Hair by Syd Hayes at Premier Hair and Makeup using Bumble and Bumble. Makeup by Yadim using M.A.C. Manicure by Maki Sakamoto for Valley NYC. Model: Missy Rayer.

You see that $2,000 Bruno Cucinelli jacket? It’s an investment! And you too can buy it! Call (212) 813-0900! Now! (And, NYT, it’s Rayder, not Rayer.)

I’m a big fan of the Awl, and to its credit it doesn’t play the cross-subsidy game. It’s not relentlessly highbrow, by any means, but it does what it wants to do and is proud of doing, and that’s it. I wish David Cho the best of fortune in trying to turn this property into a real and profitable business — it certainly deserves to be one. But I’m also a fan of HuffPo, and the NYT, and ProPublica, and Reuters, and all the other business models that people use to put important and interesting content online. And frankly it doesn’t redound to anybody’s credit when an important employee at one of them starts calling a rival’s business model “shady”.

Last Wednesday, I picked up on the excellent taxation story which David Cay Johnston syndicated to a group of 40 alt-weeklies. It got a fair amount of attention — but then, five days later, on Monday, it exploded:

Our web site crashed today for about 3 hours. We are now back up and it appears that the culprit is the David Cay Johnston story on “9 Things The Rich Don’t Want You to Know about Taxes.” For a period of time, we were getting 12,000 page views request per minute!

What caused this massive firehose of traffic to the Willamette Week’s website? It wasn’t Drudge, or Yahoo, or any other big gun on the internet. Instead, as far as I can tell, it was old-fashioned old media — specifically, radio. Monday, you see, was tax day — the deadline for any American to file their tax return. And on tax day every year, radio stations around the country all decide to talk about taxes.

David’s story was perfectly pitched as a topic for discussion on such shows: well written, controversial, and timely. And it seems that millions of Americans, all thinking about taxes and listening to radio hosts talk about the article, were sufficient to crash the Willamette Week’s website.

How did they all end up going to the same place, rather than to, say, the more central version at altweeklies.com? It probably helps that the editor of the Willamette Week is also the president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, and was one of the key driving forces behind the article. The Willamette Week version was also the one that David himself linked to when he told his friends about the piece.

But thanks to Google’s search-ranking algorithm, someone was always going to end up with the lion’s share of the traffic for the article. Links like mine might not have generated a lot of traffic in and of themselves, but Google noticed them. So come Monday, when radio listeners were searching for the article, Google sent them to the version which had inbound links from places like Reuters — rather than to any other version.

I’ve been thinking a bit of late about what happens when the same piece appears in multiple different places online. Historically, publishers haven’t liked it when that happens, because they fear that the other websites might end up with traffic which is rightfully theirs. They also worry about SEO: that someone searching for an article will end up elsewhere, or that search engines will consider the content to be spammy on the grounds that it’s appearing in lots of different places.

But my feeling is that syndication — publishing the same article in many different places — is normally a good thing. If everybody’s asked to link back to the original version of the piece, that’s ideal: it’s a clear sign to search engines which version they should prioritize. But even if they don’t, there’s a very good chance that the winner of the Google lottery will end up being entirely deserving, as the Willamette Week was in this case — none of the other alt-weeklies which published the piece had a stronger claim to the traffic than the Willamette Week did, and there’s no way to spread the traffic around evenly.

And more generally, if you want influence, it’s a good idea to go to where readers are, rather than to force them to come to you. That’s why I’m happy for Seeking Alpha to republish my posts — the overwhelming majority of my readers there would never read my pieces if they weren’t there, but many of them, after discovering me on Seeking Alpha, become regular readers of my Reuters blog. Reuters probably gets precious little direct traffic from Seeking Alpha, but it does get mindshare and influence — and those will ultimately show up in a larger number of loyal visitors.

This is why I think that publishers are misguided when they complain about sites like the Huffington Post aggregating their content and linking back to them. It’s true that most readers of a HuffPo piece won’t follow the link to the original source — but that’s fine. They probably wouldn’t have read the original story anyway. Instead, HuffPo readers are getting exposure to that news source in a place and in a style that suits them. And HuffPo is giving that news source valuable Google juice, to boot. Which means that next time there’s a surge in Google searches on a given topic, the news source is likely to get more traffic. Everybody wins — unless, of course, the web servers end up crashing.

Paul Steiger is rightly proud of his latest Pulitzer — the second for ProPublica in as many years. He’s right, too, that such things don’t come cheap:

One last point: to do this, it takes money. ProPublica is a non-profit, and contributions are tax deductible. We had more than 1300 donors last year and almost 500 so far this year. The median donation is $50, but whatever you can give will be greatly appreciated, and will truly help us make a difference. I invite you to celebrate with us by making a contribution by clicking here.

Sadly, individual donations — certainly not individual donations of $50 — won’t make a difference. According to ProPublica’s Form 990, Paul Steiger and his managing editor, Stephen Engelberg, made $959,811 between them in 2009 — $585,117 for Steiger and $374,694 for Engelberg. Senior reporter Dafna Linzer made $225,876. The total wage bill for 47 people for the year came to $5,267,678, or an average of $112,000 per person, not including things like pension contributions, other benefits, freelance costs, and payroll taxes.

It’s entirely within ProPublica’s rights to pay such salaries, but Steiger’s 1,300 donors, each pitching in $50, will generate a total of $65,000 — enough to pay Steiger’s wages for almost six weeks. If they all doubled their donation, he’d raise $130,000 — enough to pay ProPublica’s total wage bill for just over one week.

The fact is that ProPublica is funded, generously, by Herb and Marion Sandler; they, and a handful of other big-name funders, are the only donors who actually make a difference. According to ProPublica’s 2010 annual report, online donations for $86,000 were rather less than 1% of ProPublica’s total fundraising haul of $9,832,000 — the bulk of which came from board members. (For which, read the Sandlers.) ProPublica is not reliant on donations from the public, and if you’re prioritizing your charitable contributions, it makes sense to target your money at organizations which really do rely on such things.

In principle, I like the idea of a non-profit news organization which is funded by its readers. But ProPublica is not that organization. If you want to make a difference by funding investigative journalism, you’ll get more bang for your buck by giving money to the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, which doesn’t have a highly-paid permanent staff. Instead, it gives out grants of between $500 and $10,000 to reporters working on important stories like Kai Wright’s recent examination of the payday lending industry.

As ever, giving anywhere is better than giving nowhere — so if you are impressed by the Pulitzer-winning work of Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein and want to support it with a donation to ProPublica, that will do some amount of good and no harm whatsoever. But if you’re going to donate that money to the cause of investigative journalism, you might want to look at other places too. Which might need it more than ProPublica does.

The Pulitzers are notorious for ignoring business journalism. But they made up for it this year: just about anything which could go to business journalism, did.

The Public Service award went to the LA Times for its investigation of corruption in the small municipality of Bell, California. The Investigative Reporting award went to Paige St John of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for her great work covering Florida’s murky property-insurance system. The National Reporting award went to Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein of Propublica for their big story on the Magnetar trade. The Commentary award went to the NYT’s wonderful economics columnist David Leonhardt. And even the Editorial Writing award went to Joseph Rago of the WSJ, who wrote even more about healthcare than Leonhardt did, from a very different perspective.

I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess as to why the 2011 Pulitzers, in particular, were so friendly to business journalism — but it’s certainly a gratifying development, especially for this year’s winners. Many congratulations to them all — and especially to ProPublica, which wins the first-ever Pulitzer award for a piece which never appeared in print. It surely won’t be the last.

The Picard complaint against JP Morgan, accusing the bank of being “at the very center “of the Madoff fraud, “and thoroughly complicit in it,” is now available in a version which names names. It kicks off in dramatic fashion:

This seems pretty damning, on its face. If JP Morgan suspected Madoff of being a Ponzi, it should certainly not have continued to abet his scheme. But where did Zames get his information? Was it by looking at the flows of cash in and out of Madoff’s accounts? No: Zames is in the investment bank, and was not involved in doing any due diligence on Madoff. Instead, his vivid but nonetheless small role in the complaint is confined to a passing statement he told Hogan over lunch.

Here’s the longer version:

On June 15, 2007, the HFUC [Hedge Fund Underwriting Committee] met to consider the proposal [to create a product linked to Madoff's funds]. On the very same day, Hogan shared with his colleagues what he had learned from Zames, that it was well-known that Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme: “For whatever its worth, I am sitting at lunch with Matt Zames who just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a [P]onzi scheme-he said if we google the guy we can see the articles for ourselves-Pls do that and let us know what you find.”

Hogan warned, “you will recall that Refco was also regulated by the same crowd [SEC, NYSE, NASD] and there was noise about them for years before it was discovered to be rotten to the core. Hopefully this is not the case here but given Matt’s view, I think we owe it to ourselves to investigate further.”

Nevertheless, Equity Exotics seemed eager to receive approval, and the further research on Madoff was limited to a Google search with no follow-up. Buyers-Russo asked one of her colleagues to “please have one of the juniors look into this rumor about Madoff that Hogan refers to below.” The analyst forwarded an article about a proposed change in SEC regulations that would eliminate a loophole in the regulations governing broker-dealers. He speculated the loophole allowed broker-dealers to run “a ‘[P]onzi’ scheme of sorts.”

Even though the article made no mention of Ponzi schemes and provided no suggestion as to why Madoff in particular would have had a “well-known cloud” over his head, upon information and belief, no further investigation was conducted—even after Zames told Hernandez that he believed his recollection was of a Wall Street Journal article from 2002 and therefore eliminated the possibility that the analyst’s explanation based on a recently-proposed regulatory change was correct.

There are two things missing from this story. The first is that there was no 2002 WSJ article which speculated that Madoff was part of a Ponzi scheme. The bank’s Jennifer Zuccarelli tells me that the article in question was the 2001 Barron’s piece by Erin Arvedlund, which I guess was published on sister site WSJ.com at some point.

The second is that the Barron’s piece itself gave no indication — at least not on its face — that Madoff was a Ponzi. The furthest it went was to raise questions about whether he might be front-running:

Those returns have been so consistent that some on the Street have begun speculating that Madoff’s market-making operation subsidizes and smooths his hedge-fund returns. Why would Madoff Securities do this? Because, in having access to such a huge capital base, it can make much larger bets — with very little risk — than it could otherwise. It works like this: Madoff Securities stands in the middle of a tremendous river of orders, which means that its traders have advance knowledge, if only by a few seconds, of what the big customers in the market are buying and selling. And by hopping on the bandwagon, the market-maker effectively locks in profits.

This is the reason why the Google search that Hogan asked for came up so empty, and probably explains why the analyst was scrabbling around a bit to find anything which suggested that Madoff was a Ponzi. He surely read the Barron’s article, in other words, but he didn’t see in it what Zames saw.

The Barron’s piece seems to have been quite widely read by people interested in Madoff — but mostly the takeaway seems to have been that investing in his funds was a great way of participating in genuine if ethically dubious returns.

Zames, however, read the piece a different way, and came away thinking Ponzi. This probably helps us understand why Zames is now the head of  Interest Rate Trading, Global Foreign Exchange, Public Finance, Global Mortgages, Tax-Oriented Investments, and Global Fixed Income at JP Morgan, and touted as a possible successor to Jamie Dimon — while the hapless junior analyst is probably off Wall Street altogether.

Picard clearly goes too far when he says that Hogan “learned from Zames that it was well-known that Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme.” But it’s surely fair to say that Zames thought “Ponzi” when he heard “Madoff,” as a result of reading the Barron’s article. And since he drew that conclusion, he naturally reckoned that lots of other readers of the article had thought the same thing.

All of which goes to prove that financial sophisticates don’t read the financial press in the same way that the general public does. It’s entirely possible that even Arvedlund herself didn’t suspect Madoff of being a Ponzi. But Zames, perspicaciously, saw that in her piece all the same. Whether that makes JP Morgan complicit in the Madoff fraud is now the subject of some extremely expensive litigation. But there’s a lesson here for financial journalists, which is well worth remembering: bankers don’t confine their reading to the literal meaning of what you write. They infer, and extrapolate, and they assume that everybody else is doing that as well.

Financial journalists, rightly, spend a lot of time trying to be very clear about what they’re saying, in an attempt to be as accessible as possible to people who aren’t financial sophisticates. But in many ways it’s more interesting to wonder what the likes of Matt Zames will think when they read any given piece. What a story says, it turns out, depends a very great deal on who exactly is reading it.

Does the World Bank have a beef with bloggers? According to Aidwatch it does:

This morning we learned that the World Bank does not consider bloggers journalists. According to Bank policy, it won’t give press accreditation to bloggers, denying them access to the media briefing center where new reports are released under embargo before they are published for the public.

In this case, the report we won’t be allowed to see an advance copy of is this year’s World Development Report, on Conflict Security and Development.

The Bank’s David Theis responds in the comments that they offered to email the report to Aidwatch in advance, but the blog’s Laura Freschi is having none of it:

I applied for the user name and password required to enter the Online Media Briefing Center through the World Bank web page this morning.

After several phone calls with other press center staffers who told me the registration was pending, we spoke and you told me that as a matter of policy, the World Bank does not give early access to blogs.

Your offer to email Bill the report directly a few hours early is not the same as allowing us access to the protected areas of the site for “accredited media outlets.” I don’t know when the WDR report was put online, but presumably those journalists registered by the Bank have had access to that report for days, and did not have to send several emails and make phone calls to get it.

My sympathies are with Freschi on this one. “Bill”, here, is William Easterly, the proprietor of Aidwatch and a former senior Bank staffer. Offering to email an advance copy of the report to Easterly is absolutely not the same as letting Aidwatch bloggers onto the same playing field as other journalists. Reuters, for instance, was shown a summary of the report weeks ago, and was also offered an interview with Sarah Cliffe, one of its lead authors. The full report arrived yesterday, and then there was a conference call today where journalists were walked through its main points. Come Sunday evening, when the embargo is lifted, there will be an informed story up and ready to go.

At the same time, however, Reuters doesn’t have the same specialized interest in the World Development Report that Aidwatch has. The Bank puts out a lot of enormous reports in advance of its two big meetings, in the spring and the fall, and generalist reporters simply don’t have the time, in a world full of important breaking news stories, to give them all the attention they deserve. Dedicated bloggers, on the other hand, do. As Freschi says, you’d “think they would WANT bloggers to write about it”.

On the other hand, I’m not entirely clear why bloggers like Freschi want this kind of insidery pre-publication access to the Bank’s reports. The value of blogs is their status as outsiders — what’s wrong with just downloading the report on Sunday, when it’s made public, taking as much time as is necessary to read it, maybe even phoning up the authors to talk about it, and then writing about it on your blog? Do blogs like Aidwatch really want to play the Bank’s PR game — the one where they put an artificial embargo on reports so that everybody will write about them at the same time without really having digested their contents or having had the opportunity to get reactions from people who know what they’re talking about?

The more media outlets which ignore embargoes the better, as far as I’m concerned. When the World Development Report goes live, Aidwatch should link to it, download it, and start reading it. As and when they find interesting bits, they should blog them. A discussion, ideally, will ensue, around a document which is public. That’s the heart of blogging — not the privilege of being told in advance what to write by a bunch of Bank staffers. So while the Bank’s refusal to grant Aidwatch media-outlet status is silly, Aidwatch’s dudgeon is I think misplaced. Honestly, try being on the embargo list sometime. You’ll love your life once you’re off it.

Update: If Aidwatch adopted the policy of Universe Today, there wouldn’t be an issue here. (h/t Oransky.) Embargoes are a bit like the VIP room at Lot 61: the only reason you’d ever want access is just because you don’t have it.

Lazar Greenfield, the former editor of Surgery News, would have been well advised to confer with Larry Summers before deciding to publish his editorial on semen in the trade mag’s February edition. Timed to coincide with Valentine’s Day, the piece reads like a quirky blog post. It starts with the effects of a starch diet on fruit flies, moves quickly on to rotifers (microscopic wheel animals), and finally moves on to humans:

As far as humans are concerned, you may think you know all about sexual signals, but you’d be surprised by new findings. It’s been known since the 1990s that heterosexual women living together synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones, but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize, the researchers suspected that semen played a role. In fact, they found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient. Female college students having unprotected sex were significantly less depressed than were those whose partners used condoms (Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93). Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity, because women using condoms were just as depressed as those practicing total abstinence. The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts and better performance on cognition tests.

So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

These “wacky musings,” in the words of Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky Adam Marcus, have resulted in Greenfield’s resignation from his post as editor of the magazine; his appointment as incoming president of the American College of Surgeons being put under review; and the entire February issue of the magazine being removed from the web while the ACS “prepares the issue” for reposting — presumably sans the offending editorial.

There are three lessons here. Firstly, the more important you are, the less leeway you have to do something silly or lighthearted — or, for that matter, to make mistakes. Secondly, if something is going to appear under the imprimatur of a venerable institution like the World Bank or the American College of Surgeons, it should be written in a tone of high seriousness, without a hint of irony or playfulness. And finally, even surgeons turn out to be rather more squeamish when it comes to the mechanisms of sexual reproduction than you might imagine.

The flipside of all this is that science blogs will continue to gain in popularity, and more generally that large and serious organizations are always going to find it difficult to communicate in a human manner, with voice and humor. Which is ultimately a shame, since in principle most of these organizations do actually want to communicate effectively. They’re just too conservative to do so.

Update: Figleaf, in the comments, suggests that the issue might be with the quality of the research being cited, rather than the tone of the editorial. It does seem reasonable to expect Surgery News to hold scientific papers to a higher standard than the titillated mainstream press.

With time rapidly running out before the debt ceiling is reached, and doom-mongering rampant about the disastrous possible consequences of the US Treasury being unable to repay its debts, just look what’s happened to the market in short-term Treasury bills!

The lack of supply was so severe on Monday, and some investors so desperate for Treasurys, that they accepted negative yields. That is something that has rarely been seen since the financial crisis.

In other words, the market simply isn’t worried about short-term US debt at all. Instead, Treasuries are rallying on what the FT describes as “the collapse of a profitable arbitrage opportunity that financial groups have used to rebuild their balance sheets after the financial crisis.”

Since late 2008 banks have made about $200 million by borrowing very cheaply in the repo markets and investing the proceeds at the Fed. But now the FDIC is levying its insurance fee on repo liabilities as well as on deposits — and that fee means the free-money machine has printed its last greenback for the banks.

With the banks no longer borrowing money in the repo markets, the people on the other side of the trade — lenders to the repo market, which are often money-market funds — have found themselves with nowhere to safely park their short-term cash. Hence the rally in Treasury bonds: it’s a product of increased demand (from money-market funds) combined with decreased supply (as the Treasury tries to borrow more at the long end and less at the short end of the curve, and as QE2 mops up much of what is being issued).

All the same, I can promise you that if short-term Treasury yields were going up rather than down, the financial press would be talking incessantly about the debt ceiling, even if the reasons were entirely technical, as they are here. So this is a good reminder that moves in the Treasury market are generally not a referendum on government policy or Congressional grandstanding. Even when they do fit the daily news narrative.

I’m intrigued by the back-and-forth between former New Yorker writer Paul Brodeur, on the one hand, and the New York Public Library, on the other.

Brodeur’s original article for the Authors Guild bulletin can be found here. He’s upset at the NYPL, because 18 years after he donated his papers to the library, the library has now decided it wants to return about 80% of the material to him — or otherwise dispose of it. Brodeur would rather see the collection remain intact, but that’s not an option: the NYPL refuses to return the 20% of his material that it wants to keep.

The NYPL’s official response is here:

The collection includes the primary source material that, in the estimation of our curatorial and archival staff, will be of greatest interest to researchers and scholars studying Brodeur’s career and his work. This includes most of Mr. Brodeur’s manuscripts, notes, and correspondence. The rest of the material consists largely of secondary source items, including copies of and from magazines and newspapers, that are available elsewhere; these are the items the Library decided could be returned to Mr. Brodeur. In doing so it was following the standards regarded by librarians and archivists as the best professional practices.

Brodeur feels misled, and has replied to the NYPL quoting emails from the curator who originally accepted his papers, saying that she “considered them fully processed.” And Angela Montefinise, the PR head at the NYPL, also sent me this statement:

“The picture Mr. Brodeur paints of The New York Public Library in his article is inaccurate. Numerous important details were left out, including several unreturned attempts by our President Paul LeClerc to meet with Mr. Brodeur. We processed this collection in accordance with the best professional standards and made necessary and proper decisions in the best interest of the Library and its users. Our deed of gift, which Mr. Brodeur signed, was clear.”

Clearly this spat isn’t going to get resolved any time soon. Brodeur, by his own admission, can be hard to deal with:

That same day, I sent an e-mail to LeClerc thanking him for his invitation and telling him I would be pleased to meet with him either on Cape Cod if he was planning to visit during the summer or when I next came down to New York City. He replied that he was not planning to visit the Cape but would make a spe­cial trip if I so desired. During the next few days, I considered LeClerc’s offer in two lights. On the one hand, I had no doubt of its sincerity. On the other hand, it seemed strange to me that high officials-in this case, LeClerc and Steele-of an institution es­teemed throughout the world as a repository for the written word should be so loathe to use it, and would seek to resolve the issue at hand through talk and con­versation instead. For this reason, I decided to pursue the matter the way it had begun-in the epistolary form.

And the fact is that although Brodeur’s full papers have indeed been sitting in the library for the past 18 years or so, they were never fully catalogued and were therefore to all intents and purposes useless. There’s no point in a library storing a writer’s papers if no one knows that they’re there, or can find any of their contents. Much better to have the best 20% of a collection fully indexed than to have 100% of it collecting dust in 300 boxes.

But equally I have a lot of sympathy with Brodeur, here — he thought he had donated all of his papers to the NYPL, only to find most of them being rejected. Decades of work were in those 300 boxes — work which everybody at the NYPL claims to hold in the highest regard — and now the collection will be torn apart forever.

A huge part of the difference in opinion between Brodeur and the NYPL comes down, I think, to the distinction I like to make between reading and writing in journalism. Brodeur’s an old-school investigative reporter, who spent 20 years (!) investigating the asbestos health hazard and its cover-up by the asbestos industry. Most of those years weren’t spent in a garrett writing: they were spent out in the field, reading and researching and reporting. Brodeur’s 300-box archive was a record of that work, and could have been an extremely valuable resource for anybody wanting an in-depth look at asbestos.

From Brodeur’s perspective, he’s a reader as much as a writer, and his work aggregating and curating a huge amount of material on asbestos and the like is a central part of what one might pompously call his praxis. From the NYPL’s perspective, on the other hand, the value in his archive lies in his “manuscripts, notes, and correspondence” — the stuff that he wrote. The huge amount of work that went in to putting together an archive of asbestos-related material from other sources is simply not particularly important: if Brodeur photocopied an obscure newspaper article, for instance, then that doesn’t have value for the NYPL so long as that newspaper article is available somewhere else in the library, or even in some other library.

But finding that article is really hard. Brodeur put a lot of work into doing so, and if the article is removed from Brodeur’s asbestos collection, there’s a good chance that never again will anybody interested in asbestos ever find or read it. In indexing Brodeur’s files, the NYPL did not catalogue all the secondary sources that Brodeur photocopied: it didn’t replace that newspaper clipping with a detailed reference to the newspaper article in question. Instead, it simply decided to discard it altogether.

The NYPL is treating Brodeur as it would an imaginative novelist, which seems to me to be something of a category error. All writers are not the same, and if you’re going to go to the trouble of archiving a journalist’s work, you should take the subject matter of the journalism seriously and also preserve the record of how that writer wrote, on top of what that writer wrote.

If the NYPL is right that junking journalistic research constitutes “best professional practice” in the world of libraries, then maybe it’s time to revisit those standards. I do appreciate that there are always space constraints. But Brodeur believes — with good reason — that some other library would have found the space to house his archive in full. If the NYPL didn’t intend to do that in 1992, it should have told him so explicitly. And if it’s changed its mind on such matters, as “best professional practices” have evolved over the years, it should be a bit more up-front and apologetic about that fact.

Update: Brodeur emails to say that “you are correct in surmising that the value of my collection of papers resides in that part of it–no doubt the part NYPL culled–which shows my methods as an investigative reporter. This is why I wish now that I had donated the collection to a School of Journalism.”

On March 25, the NYT’s David Kocieniewski splashed a bombshell of a story across the front page; its current headline, online, is “GE’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether”:

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

Cue a massive scurrying sound, as dozens of journalists around the country started talking to GE, trying to work out whether or not the NYT allegations were actually correct. GE’s own PR operation was far from helpful in this regard, simultaneously claiming that GE did make “significant US federal income tax payments” while telling AFP that “GE did not pay US federal taxes last year because we did not owe any”. The @GEpublicaffairs Twitter account, in particular, became a case study in how not to communicate in the age of social media.

Now, after literally months of work, Allan Sloan and Jeff Gerth of Fortune and ProPublica have come along to adjudicate the issue. Squeezing months of work into just a couple of weeks is a neat trick, which isn’t nearly as clever as the way that GE pays single-digit income taxes despite a corporate tax rate of 35% — it just so happens that Sloan and Gerth were working on a GE taxes story anyway, so they’d already done a lot of the legwork needed to get to the bottom of the matter when the NYT story came out.

The verdict? The NYT got the truth right, but the facts wrong. GE hasn’t actually filed its tax return for 2010 yet, and when it does it will pay some unknown amount in US income taxes. This admission was dragged painfully and reluctantly out of GE’s secretive tax department by Sloan and Gerth, and was not available to Kocieniewski; probably were it not for Kocieniewski’s article, GE would never have revealed it.

What we have here, then, is a classic example of the power of iterative journalism. In the wake of a big story, further important details nearly always emerge. But in this case, the NYT was the worst possible place for those details to be published and the story to iterate: the paper was far too busy formally standing by its story and failing to engage GE’s PR spin in public. So it’s great that Sloan and Gerth — both veteran financial journalists who aren’t daunted by obscure 3,000-page leasing handbooks — were perfectly positioned to pick up the story and carry it forwards.

The big picture, here, is just as scandalous as Kocieniewski made it out to be. GE can, at the margin, raise or lower its tax bill by billions of dollars at a stroke, simply by declaring overseas profits to be indefinitely invested abroad. It epitomizes the revolving door between the IRS and private industry — the head of GE’s tax department, for instance, is a former Treasury tax official. It has its very own US tax loophole — the “active finance exemption”. It uses the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 to save hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes every year by moving jobs to Ireland. And so on and so forth.

So let’s see more cases like this one, where one big publication picks up another outlet’s ball and runs with it. Historically, media outlets have chased exclusives at the cost of enlightenment. If they can all pull in the same direction, as here, the results can be fantastic.