Felix Salmon

Padraic Fallon died on Saturday night, age 66. The news came as a shock to me, not least because I was pretty sure that Fallon was 66 years old back in 1995, when I first met him. Euromoney, naturally, is the place to turn for a characteristically warm and spicy remembrance, but you can be sure that across London — and large swaths of Ireland, too — there are thousands more such remembrances being retold tonight, always with an alcoholic accompaniment.

It’s rare to find an English financial journalist who hasn’t intersected with Padraic at some point. (He’s one of those men known universally by their first names; one of the pleasures of working for Euromoney was listening to bankers mangle the pronunciation of “Padraic” while affecting a close friendship with the man.) Thousands of us went through the legendary Euromoney Publications graduate-trainee scheme, where the first thing we were told to do was to read his famous, and quite intimidating, style guide. And then, for those of us who worked on Euromoney magazine, there were the occasional editorial meetings chaired by the man himself in the company boardroom. The first words Padraic ever spoke to me were at one of those meetings. I remember those words to this day: “Are you wearing an earring??”

I realize now — and only now — that Padraic was still in his 40s at the time, but the cigar-chomping chairman was already a legend. Everybody who read his style guide knew that he was a fantastic writer, with a copy-editor’s eye for detail. But then he was so much more: a fantastic reporter, for one. And a fantastic editor. And an excellent publisher, who could sell and charm (or charm and sell) as well as anyone. And a highly-aggressive businessman, to boot, who always paid himself handsomely: last year alone he made about $8.5 million.

On top of that, Padraic was never a man shy about his opinions: one of the ways that he built Euromoney into a powerhouse in the first place was by being unapologetic about being a cheerleader for the then-nascent Euromarkets — basically, the market for offshore dollars, which weren’t taxed by the U.S. government. While at the same time relishing the scoop and the scandal as much as any journalist.

The opinionated founder-editor-publisher, of course, is the kind of person we see a lot of these days: think Mike Arrington, or Nick Denton, or Josh Marshall, or many others. In that sense it’s a very modern role, but it’s also as old as publishing itself, and Padraic was one of the masters. He also understood, long before the World Wide Web was even invented, the power of having multiple platforms: he was early to branch out into conferences, book publishing, and like. He also, I believe, was responsible for the Euromoney Awards: if you haven’t heard of Euromoney magazine, you’ve certainly seen the awards logo appear in the corner of hundreds of bank advertisements all over the world.

Padraic could make mistakes: his ideology and his ambition led him to the board of Allied Irish Bank, where he served from 1998 to 2007, overseeing the very years where the bank overstretched itself massively and then ultimately became insolvent. He also asked me to design a new publication he had decided to put out, called MTNWeek. But to err is human, and in many ways the most attractive thing about Padraic was just how human he was.

Every so often I’m asked how I ended up doing what I do; ultimately, the man responsible for my entire career, such as it is, was Padraic Fallon. He pretty much invented the idea that journalists could have huge success writing about bonds for a living, and he instilled in me a deep understanding of the bond market (and its corollary, a deep mistrust of the stock market) which served me very well indeed, first when I was writing about sovereign debt restructurings in the early 2000s, and then when I started blogging the financial crisis.

Padraic was very old-fashioned in many ways: the cigars, the dinners at the Savoy, the chauffeur-driven car. But he was also a great believer in modernity and change, and in particular the ability of small groups of badly-paid twenty-somethings to out-work, out-report, and generally beat much larger groups of much more well remunerated veteran reporters. Padraic gave thousands of us hugely valuable transferrable skills, as well as the idea the bond market is always the most important market, anywhere. He was surely right about that.

I was one of the “oxpeckers” quoted by Joe Coscarelli giving the new NYT public editor, Margaret Sullivan, a “rapturous reception” — not on the grounds that she was particularly spot-on in her judgments, but rather on the grounds that she has been infinitely better than her predecessors when it comes to engaging with the enormous range of voices with an interest in the NYT’s content, both on her blog and on Twitter.

Sullivan was unknown to the New York oxpecker crowd when she was appointed, and as she engages, her views are, naturally, coming into focus. She hails from Buffalo, which is much more conservative than New York City in both senses of the word. That was a good choice: I suspect that she’s more representative of the NYT’s broad national readership than just about any long-term Brooklynite would be.

For instance, on Tuesday Sullivan criticized the newspaper for running a quirky photo illustrating a quirky story; it was taken inside a men’s bathroom, and Sullivan declared that she “could have easily done without” it. More substantively, a substantial part of Sullivan’s harsh take on Andrew Goldman was based on the fact that “he used a strong obscenity” in a Twitter exchange. Indeed, she said that “given the level of obscenity” in his tweets, the NYT should think about setting up “a clear social media policy”.

Later, on Twitter, Sullivan clarified her thoughts a bit: she wasn’t necessarily into micro-managing what NYT staff and freelancers think, but does reckon that there should be “no blatant misogyny, no raging racism, that kind of thing”.

Personally, I think that by the time you need a social media policy to tell your journalists not to put raging racism on Twitter, it’s already far too late. But what’s interesting to me is the ease with which Sullivan lumped Goldman’s “strong obscenity” in with misogyny and racism, and the vehemence with which she reacted against it. While no New Yorker that I know would consider the tweet obscene at all. Here’s the single tweet she reacted so strongly against:

Sullivan’s column on Goldman was notable for the fact that she didn’t actually talk to him. That’s fine, in principle: you don’t need to talk to people before you criticize them, and Sullivan did tell Goldman that she would be “glad to consider” a followup if he had anything to add. But if there’s one small criticism I would make of Sullivan, it’s that she’s too shy when it comes to engaging with people she disagrees with.

The most obvious example, here, is her verdict on the term “illegal immigrant”. After asking for a discussion of the debate about the use of the term, Sullivan received — on nytimes.com, no less — a long and sophisticated answer from NYT reporter Lawrence Downes. He uses the phrase himself, but with many reservations, since it “defines an entire person,” he says, “not merely an unlawful act”.

The word turns 11 million people into a suspect class of quasi-criminals. It is a class-action adjective. It is the reason the country has not yet passed sweeping immigration reform, which in theory should be an easy thing to do.

Downes’s essay deserved a thoughtful response; in the end, it didn’t even get a link from Sullivan. Instead, after stating that “I’ve thought a great deal about this volatile topic”, she simply declared that the term “illegal immigrant” is “clear and accurate”, and that readers would not benefit were it banned from the paper. That’s a reasonable conclusion to come to, but a bit more detail on how she got there, or what she thought of what Downes wrote, would have enriched her piece significantly.

Every public editor shapes the job as he or she sees fit. Sullivan’s conception of the job is that she should be an engaged media pundit, not afraid of her own opinions — and that’s very welcome and refreshing. Her predecessors felt too constrained by the role: they worried about the weight their pronouncements would carry both inside and outside the newsroom, and were therefore too cautious when it came to doling them out willy-nilly. Sullivan doesn’t have that worry: she knows that the newsroom will feel free to ignore her. And that gives her latitude to be much more approachable and opinionated, both about the NYT and about other news organizations.

The result is that she’s turning into what you might call a media pundit with a bully pulpit. Ed Champion could never get a response from NYT Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren to his questions; Sullivan can. She has her own opinions — but she’s also responsible for representing the public inside the newsroom, and so she can extract answers from journalists and editors where very few others could. It’s a power and a privilege, and I’m glad that Sullivan is putting to full use her newfound ability to exercise it.

One of my slogans is that “if you’re never wrong you’re never interesting”, and Sullivan is a great example of that in action. I disagree with her on some things; I think she’s downright wrong on others. (A formal social-media policy encompassing even freelancers? No good could come of such a thing, quite aside from the fact that it would give the NYT’s legion of haters a bottomless well of potential ammunition.) The thing is, I’m happy that she’s wrong. Because it means that she realizes that the real value of her output is not in what she says, but rather in the way in which she can act as a venue for a fascinating conversation between the NYT and its many critics. Debates are always more interesting than pronouncements, and Sullivan’s hugely welcome innovation is to encourage the former, while effectively downplaying the importance of the latter.

TSG and Edward Champion have found a flurry of lawsuits brought by Penguin various authors who never delivered the books they promised. The lawsuits are asking for the authors’ advances back — but they’re also asking for interest, at pretty high and arbitrary rates.

Going down the list, Penguin is asking for $2,000 in interest from Rebecca Mead, on a $20,000 advance: that’s 10%. Marguerite Kelly is being asked for $5,000 in interest on her $25,000 advance, which is 20%. Lucy Danielle Siegle, Bob Morris, and Deborah Branscum are also being asked for 20% in interest, Elizabeth Wurtzel is at 25%, Jamal Bryant is at 24%, Carol Guber is at 26%, Herman Rosenblat is at 33%, and the Reverend Conrad Tillard is being asked for 35% on the unrepaid portion of his advance. Meanwhile, John Dizard is being asked for 45% in interest, while Ana Marie Cox is being asked for a whopping $50,000 in interest, which is 61.5% of her $81,250 advance.

There are two ways I can think of to justify the enormous range here. The first is just that the contracts were written differently. But if you look at the contracts in the lawsuits (for instance, in the filings for Cox, Wurtzel, Mead, Rosenblat, and Tillard), there’s no mention of interest or interest rates at all.

The other potential justification is that the interest has been accruing over time, and that the authors being asked for the highest interest rates are those who are most behind on their obligations. But that doesn’t hold up either. Wurtzel, for instance, signed her contract in February 2003, and Penguin asked for its $33,000 back in October 2008. If you annualize the interest she’s being asked for, it comes to 2.4% per year if you date the obligation back to 2003, or, alternatively, to 5.8% if you date it back to 2008.

Cox, by contrast, signed her contract much later, in January 2006, and Penguin asked for its money back a little earlier, in August 2007. (Penguin’s clearly a lot less patient when it comes to Cox than when it comes to Wurtzel.) The interest Cox is being asked for works out at 9.2% per year using the earlier date, or 12.1% per year using the later date.

In other words, there’s really no rhyme or reason whatsoever to the interest rates being demanded from these authors. And there’s a reason for going through this exercise: it reveals just how capricious and arbitrary Penguin is being, here. One book agent, Robert Gottlieb, immediately responded on the record, commenting on TSG that “if Penguin did this to one of Trident’s authors we could cut them out of all our submissions” — and you can be quite sure that Penguin did consider the agents of the authors in question before taking this course of action.

Publishers have a lot of power: they can reject a book, and ask for the author’s advance back, just if they say they don’t like the way that it’s written. That $325,000 advance they gave to Ana Marie Cox is certainly a lot of money, but most of it was never paid out, and if Cox’s star waned between the time that the deal was signed and the time that the book was due, Penguin could and did quite quickly move to make it very clear that they didn’t want the book after all — and that they did want their $81,250 back. Regardless of how much work and time and money Cox had invested into the book up to that point.

So while on the one hand it’s reasonable for publishers to ask for their money back if they never got anything in return, on the other hand the incredibly arbitrary nature of these suits — who gets one, who doesn’t, who gets asked for a little interest on top, who gets asked for lots — only serves to underscore the sheer unpredictability inherent in the publishing industry. You might think that you’ve hit the jackpot when you score a massive-sounding book advance. But in fact you’re just embarking on the toughest and most volatile part of the entire process.

Huffington Post Live launched today. Don’t call it streaming video: “it’s really a platform for engagement,” in the words of its founding editor, Roy Sekoff. What does that mean in practice? Let’s play Celebrity Google Hangouts! Here’s your host, Josh Zepps. Take it away, Josh:

John Cusack, you brought this to our attention. What struck you about it? It’s one of those ideas that sounds just crazy enough to work?

Amazingly, they’re talking about Mortgage Resolution Partners, and its plan to make lots of money by buying up performing mortgages on the cheap using eminent domain. I wrote about MRP here, and here, and here; suffice to say, it’s a bad idea. But! Let’s see what John Cusack thinks!

Yeah, I just thought it was a, seemed to be a question of um, you know, um, fundamental fairness, um, and, I, these, these, er gentlemen, um, John, um, Vlahoplus, who’s, who’s a Rhodes Scholar, and who’s studied this stuff and worked in the financial industries, and has a long history of working with that, and Kevin McCabe, who is, is working with the, er, is a founder of the Community Partnerships, which is an independent group which is working with Mortgage Resolution Partners, er, gave us a view from 30,000 feet, and, um, they really feel like this eminent domain thing can work, and kind of reset the markets.

There’s actually a certain amount of timeliness to this subject: Joe Stiglitz and Mark Zandi have one of those bipartisan op-eds in the NYT today, praising Jeff Merkley’s excellent proposal to help underwater homeowners. That proposal could scale to hundreds of billions of dollars and make a real dent in the problem; it also wouldn’t exclude you if, say, your mortgage is owned by Frannie, or a bank.

But over the course of more than 18 minutes, Merkley and his proposal are never mentioned. Instead, we have that guy from Hot Tub Time Machine explaining that “I would imagine from our discussions that the opposition is a very narrow group of people, as opposed to the very broad public good this would do… All the smart people that I talk to, and believe me I’m no expert even though I have a big mouth, tell me that this is in everybody’s best interest except a very narrow group of people”.

To which Arianna Huffington can only respond: “That’s what it comes down to, a very narrow group of people versus the public interest”.

In reality I’m far from alone in being a big supporter of principal reductions, while opposing this particular idea, which seems to benefit Mortgage Resolution Partners first and everybody else only as an afterthought. But HuffPo didn’t invite anybody like me along for their chat: instead, they invited John Vlahoplus, the chief strategy officer at… Mortgage Resolution Partners. And he was allowed to get away with saying that he has “the overwhelming support of communities and of homeowners” and that the only opponents to his scheme are “a very narrow group of companies who’ve bought these securities very cheaply, and they’ve been fighting really hard, together with Sifma and the American Securitization Forum, to stop this. And they’re intimidating local communities. They’re threatening to red-line local communities”.

This kind of uncontested demagoguery is decidedly unpleasant, and feels as though HuffPo has decided it wants to be the Fox News of the knee-jerk left. Or, as Cusack might put it, “What’s beautiful about this” is that “it’s a real grassroots thing”. It’s a rare — and quite scary — window, directly into the psyche of how HuffPo thinks. Let’s just hope they don’t decide to start covering autism the same way they’re covering underwater mortgages.

Arthur Brisbane, the NYT public editor, has a characteristically skittish column on earnings reports. He quotes lots of journalists (Dean Starkman! Gretchen Morgenson! Larry Ingrassia! Jim Cramer!), and ends with advice worthy of Polonius:

Always be sure to meet company spin with appropriate skepticism. If nontraditional profit metrics are involved, bring the reporting back around to good old-fashioned net income. If a company wants to strip out adverse factors, be sure to strip them back in.

And don’t get swept away by the Kabuki theater of gerrymandered expectations.

This is what you get when long-in-the-tooth journalists with no business-desk experience try to parachute in and tell financial types how to do their job: “On the assumption that a lot of Times readers are also investors,” writes Brisbane, “I wondered how earnings articles could be tailored to help readers with investment decisions.”

Let’s dispatch that one quickly: there are things which help investors with their investment decisions. And there are NYT articles about corporate earnings. And there is no reason at all for the latter to attempt to be the former.

Brisbane does, dimly, understand that earnings reports are problematic, from a journalistic perspective. But he doesn’t understand the fundamental tension that explains why they’re so difficult, which is that the news value of earnings reports is entirely orthogonal to the value that the market finds in them.

As far as the market is concerned, earnings reports are all about short-term tactical positioning. Everybody’s trying to position themselves against what they think the earnings report will say, and how they think the market will react. At its simplest this is just a question of whether the company will “beat expectations” or not, but there are second-order and third-order effects as well, and much of the smart money is doing all manner of highly-complex trading in the options market rather than the cash market. As a result, the reaction of the share price to the earnings statement, unless it’s huge, generally tells you almost nothing about the substance of that statement.

The sensible reaction to such a world, if you’re a journalist, is Larry Ingrassia’s: to ignore nearly all earnings reports, unless there’s real news value in them or unless there’s broad public fascination with the company and its fortunes. And when you do cover a company’s earnings, the sensible thing to do is to try to use them as a window onto a broader story, rather than as a significant news event in and of themselves.

Doing so naturally opens yourself up to the kind of gotchas that Brisbane opens his column with. He seems to be shocked that different news organizations might have different takes on the same earnings report, and concludes that such stories are nothing more than “a Rorschach test for reporters: what they see is what they think they see”. That’s incredibly unfair: the reality is that precisely because the news value of most earnings reports is so slim, smart news outlets treat them as a way to provide a broader perspective on the company. And there are as many ways of doing that as there are reporters.

On the other hand, the financial press doesn’t have that luxury — if you’re working for a financial newswire, or for the Wall Street Journal, then you have to be focused on the stock at least as much as you are on the company. As a result, you have no choice but to talk about market expectations. What’s more, you have to go into some detail about the actual earnings, and you have to write about whatever metrics the market is paying most attention to. Sometimes, that will be “good old-fashioned net income”. Often, it won’t be.

If you own stock in a fast-growing company in a young market, for instance, you would probably be rather worried if that company started posting outsize profits, rather than reinvesting them in growth. And right now, when companies are sitting on enormous cash piles and the last thing they need is even bigger cash piles, a large net profit is in many ways a sign that the company in question has reached the limit of what it can do, and has no real ability to reinvest capital or to boost future growth.

Dell, for instance, had net income of $635 million in the last quarter, and $3.2 billion over the past 12 months; that’s good for a market capitalization of just over $20 billion. Amazon, by contrast, had net income of $7 million in the last quarter, and $377 million over the past 12 months: a tiny fraction of the kind of profit that Dell is making. And yet it has a market cap of more than $100 billion.

So let’s not pretend that the One True Earnings Report is the one that concentrates on net income as the most important indicator every quarter. Especially when you have things like large one-off write-downs, net income becomes downright misleading unless its components are properly explained. And let’s not pretend, too, that there’s some unique truth underlying every earnings report, and that if journalists were only perspicacious enough, they’d all write exactly the same thing. Your audience matters: are you writing for traders, or are you writing for general-news consumers? And if it’s the latter, then in many ways the faster you get away from the earnings and move onto something more interesting, the better.

As for general readers, there’s really no point in reading the typical earnings report in a financial publication. If you’re a trader, and you don’t already know what happened with the earnings, then, well, you shouldn’t be a trader. And if you’re not a trader, these reports are not for you. If, on the other hand, you find yourself reading about an interesting company’s earnings, somewhere, and the story grabs your attention, then there might well be something worth reading there. But if there is, then the chances are that the worthwhile information is informed mostly by reporting that preceded the release of the earnings. They’re just a news hook, really.

I feel for Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan of ProPublica, who have spent 3,700 words and some enormous amount of time trying to track down the source of dubious cybercrime statistics. I went through something similar in 2005, looking at counterfeiting statistics: I can attest to how frustrating and thankless it is trying to follow footnote after footnote in a futile attempt to find something substantive amidst the exaggerated rhetoric.

The short story here: the US government loves to say that the cost of cybercrime in the US is $250 billion per year, while the cost of cybercrime globally is $1 trillion per year. The government loves to say that because it’s in the business of fighting cybercrime, and it loves to feel important. But in reality, those figures are more or less picked out of thin air, and have very little in the way of solid scientific basis. What’s more, they’re all sourced from for-profit companies with a lot of skin in the game: Symantec and McAfee, manufacturers of anti-cybercrime software.

The most interesting thing, to me, about the ProPublica report is that the $1 trillion number ostensibly comes from a scientific survey, but in fact comes from a press release which accompanied that survey. The survey itself never said anything of the sort. In that, it’s just like the $5 trillion which hedge funds are supposed to be managing in five years’ time. (Thanks, Citigroup, for inventing that figure and placing it in the WSJ and elsewhere.)

Is this something they teach at PR school? Commission a scholarly report, and then distribute it with a press release featuring eye-popping assertions to be found nowhere in the report? I suspect that it happens much more than most journalists would like to admit.

What’s worse, once public institutions have officially cited these bogus stats, they feel that it would be shameful to ever distance themselves from them — hence the unedifying responses in the ProPublica piece from US spokespeople, which basically amount to “hey, it’s not our job to check facts, if McAfee puts something in a press release, that’s good enough for us”.

The reason that PR types do this, of course, is that it works. They know that most journalists are much more comfortable working off a press release than putting the work into reading and understanding a long report; they also know that even if most journalists do read the report and steer clear of the story, that doesn’t matter so long as some journalists wind up falling for the bogus numbers. And most importantly, they know that they’ll never get punished in any way for putting out false or misleading information: while journalists are expected to check facts, PR people are shameless.

Which means that the conclusion to my 2005 piece is as true today as it was back then: if you ever see seemingly authoritative statistics being bandied around by journalists or politicians, always bear in mind that there’s a good chance they’re utter bullshit. Especially if they’re particularly striking, or don’t pass the smell test.

One of the most interesting takes on l’affaire Jonah Lehrer comes in a book review which was almost certainly written before any of the latest revelations: Evgeny Morozov’s hilarious and masterful dismantling of Parag Khanna in particular and the whole TED mindset in general. Whatever else you do this weekend, make sure to read it: you won’t be sorry. But this part is directly relevant to Lehrer:

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.”

The TED “ecosystem” — the scare quotes are unavoidable — has what Nathan Heller, in his New Yorker profile, called a “closely governed editorial process”:

The conference’s “curators” feel out a speaker’s interests, looking for material that’s new and counterintuitive. They think about form. A TED talk tends to follow one of several narrative arcs (some have three acts, others are cast as detective stories, others are polemics)…

The real work of the curators, though, often comes down to emotional shading. When Cain first drafted her talk, it was thick with statistics and case-making data. Looking at other TED lectures, though, she decided to replace some of her data points with stories—an inclination that the conference’s curators pushed even further. A moving narrative about her grandfather’s bookish introversion now concluded the lecture. “I’ve had to stifle my appetite for nuance,” she said, about the lost statistics.

One of the less-remarked aspects of TED is that although it popularizes science, it features very few of the people whose job it is to popularize science: science journalists. Although the beneficient spirit of Malcom Gladwell hovers invisibly over most of the proceedings, these talks are far removed from any culture of journalistic ethics. The scientists don’t consider what they do at TED to be science, and the ones who make it onto the TED Talks site are the ones most willing to let TED’s curators guide them to a trite and facile narrative nirvana. They often don’t need much guiding, these days: the TED formula, perfectly celebrated/skewered here, is at this point ingrained in the mind of almost anybody who wants to give a talk there.

And here’s the thing: for all that Jonah Lehrer ultimately wound up blogging for the New Yorker, he has always been a creature of TED much more than he has been a creature of journalism.* Check out Seth Mnookin’s post, today, on Jonah Lehrer’s missing compass: the way that Lehrer remixed facts in service of narrative is very TED. Mnookin says that Lehrer had “the arrogance to believe that he has the right to rejigger reality to make things a little punchier, or a little neater”. A journalist would call that arrogance — would call it, indeed, the action of a man with no moral compass. On the other hand, a TED curator, or a monologuist, might see things very differently.

Which is something that Morozov doesn’t touch on in his review: that TED-think isn’t merely vapid, it’s downright dangerous in the way that it devalues intellectual rigor at the expense of tricksy emotional and narrative devices. TED is a hugely successful franchise; its stars, like Jonah Lehrer, are going to continue to percolate into the world of journalism. And when they get there, they’ll be deeply versed in the dark arts of manipulating facts in order to create something perfectly self-contained and compelling. Does any editor out there want to take it upon herself to try to unteach such arts, when bringing on a hot new star? I didn’t think so.

I don’t know how to solve this problem. TED isn’t going away: indeed, it’s so successful that it is spawning dozens of competitors, even as many publications, including the New Yorker as well as Wired, the NYT Magazine, the Atlantic, and many others, move aggressively into the “ideas” space. The cross-pollination between the conferences and the publications will continue, as will everybody’s desire to draw as big an audience as possible. Which says to me that Jonah Lehrer will not be the last person to trip up in this manner. In fact, he might turn out to be one of the first.

*Update: Clay Shirky informs me that Jonah Lehrer has never actually given a TED talk.

Update 2: A lot of people seem to think that it matters, for the purposes of this post, whether Lehrer has actually given a talk at TED (as opposed to PopTech, where he has spoken, or any of the other TED clones out there). Certainly the post would be a bit more elegant if Lehrer had been a genuine TED star, with millions of views for his TED talk. But I absolutely stand by my assertion that he’s a creature of TED, and that his writing is decidedly TED-esque in its prioritization of narratives over niceties.

Bloomberg News has been run, since inception, along the lines laid out very clearly by its editor-in-chief, Matt Winkler, in The Bloomberg Way. But you don’t need to buy a copy of the book to know what the Bloomberg Way means: if you spend any time at all reading Bloomberg articles, you’ll know exactly how it feels to read them.

Of late, however, Bloomberg has started injecting some serious attitude into various parts of the empire which are close to — if not strictly part of — the central news organization. Look at Richard Turley’s covers for Bloomberg Businessweek, for instance: “Most of my work involves trying to turn the capitalist system against itself,” he told AdAge, “but try not to tell anyone that”. Or look at @bobivry’s balls-out Twitter feed (sample tweet, from yesterday: “Sandy Weill just made me throw up.”)

Now a Bloomberg View columnist, Bill Cohan, has delivered an entire column devoted to fisking Loren Feldman’s long NYT piece about the court case currently pending against Goldman Sachs brought by James and Janet Baker, a couple who sold their company for $580 million in worthless stock.

I remember thinking, when I read Feldman’s story, that it felt like it wasn’t telling the whole story. For one thing, how was it that this lawsuit has managed to drag on for over a decade? (Although Feldman never actually says when the suit was filed, so that bit was always a bit fuzzy.) And secondly, what kind of M&A banker blithely goes on vacation when his client is having a hugely important meeting with the acquiring company, saying that he would be unable to call in “and that it was pointless to send anybody else from Goldman because there wasn’t time to catch up on the deal”?

Cohan doesn’t answer either of those questions, but he does reveal other germane information which Feldman either missed or chose to ignore. For instance: Goldman advised the Bakers consider hedging the stock they received in the transaction; the Bakers rejected that advice. And: the Bakers’ suit against Goldman is just one of many different lawsuits they have brought against more than 30 separate defendants, including KPMG and SG Cowen; so far those suits have resulted in the Bakers being awarded more than $70 million. And: in those suits, at least according to Goldman, the Bakers swore under oath that their company had done due diligence on its acquirer; that the due diligence was not Goldman’s job; and that in any case “no amount of due diligence could have detected the fraud”.

Cohan concludes by describing Feldman’s story as a “one-sided potshot” — and I have to say I love it when I see that kind of say-what-you-mean language coming from any part of the Bloomberg empire. Winkler is notoriously allergic to ad hominem attacks, and media organizations in general tend to be very shy when it comes to criticizing each other, especially outside clearly-labeled media-criticism ghettoes. No one wants to throw the first stone.

The fact is, however, that Cohan’s column does a good job of placing Feldman’s story in a bigger perspective. I don’t sign on to Cohan’s opinions, either in this piece or elsewhere: I think his sympathy with Goldman’s argument that it was only advising the company and not its shareholders, for instance, is misplaced. And while I’m OK with opening sentences which liken Goldman Sachs to a deep-sea cephalopod, Cohan’s decision to compare the company to Jerry Sandusky seems unnecessarily vile.

But when it comes to the substance of Cohan’s column, I think he makes his case quite well: it can be dangerous to take NYT stories about Goldman Sachs at face value. I only wish that Feldman felt free to reply, and that we could have some real iterative journalism here about what really went on in this deal.

Most of all, though, I wish that one of Feldman and Cohan had seen fit to upload some or all of the legal source materials they reviewed. The NYT’s document viewer is great for such things, and Bloomberg is entirely capable of publishing primary documents too. Here’s the one place where Feldman and Cohan are saying exactly the same thing: Feldman talks about how his account “is based on a trove of legal filings”, and Cohan talks about how his piece is based on vague “court documents I reviewed”. Neither links to any of those documents, and neither gives much of a hint of what exactly those documents are, or where they might be found. It’s classic “trust me, I’m a journalist” reporting, and it’s offputting in both instances.

By all means tell us what certain documents are saying. But when you do so, show us those documents at the same time, so that if we’re so inclined, we can judge for ourselves. At the very least, if you don’t upload or point to the documents, explain why you’re failing to do so. Right now, we know that Feldman looked at a bunch of documents and came away thinking very little of Goldman; we also know that Cohan looked at a bunch of documents and came away much more sympathetic to the bank. But we don’t even know whether they were even looking at the same documents or not. And neither is letting us draw our own conclusions.

So while Bloomberg’s move into content-with-attitude is entirely welcome, I’d love to see it do more when it comes to linking to primary documents. The NYT, too, for that matter. Both of them are good at such things sometimes: Jonathan Weil, in particular, is great. But it doesn’t seem to have sunk in to the corporate DNA yet.

Update: Apparently Cohan did attach two documents to his column, but they initially showed up only on the Bloomberg terminal. They’re up online now; let’s hope for more!

Back in 2009, when Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote Too Big To Fail, Moe Tkacik picked up on one particular anecdote: that Joe Gregory, who “loved being the in-house philosopher-king” at Lehman Brothers, was prone to handing out copies of Malcom Gladwell’s Blink to employees, and “had even hired the author to lecture employees on trusting their instincts when making difficult decisions”. Then Joe Weisenthal, reading Tkacik’s post, immediately reblogged it under the very TBI headline “GUILTY: Malcolm Gladwell Caused Lehman To Fail”.

Now, in a classic case of history repeating itself, we find a new book — this time Frank Partnoy’s Wait — reprising the same Gladwell-Lehman story.* Indeed, it’s in some ways the whole reason that Wait was written. Here’s Partnoy talking to Smithsonian’s Megan Gambino:

What made you want to take a closer look at the timing of decisions?

I interviewed a number of former senior executives at Lehman Brothers and discovered a remarkable story. Lehman Brothers had arranged for a decision-making class in the fall of 2005 for its senior executives. It brought four dozen executives to the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and brought in leading decision researchers, including Max Bazerman from Harvard and Mahzarin Banaji, a well-known psychologist. For the capstone lecture, they brought in Malcolm Gladwell, who had just published Blink, a book that speaks to the benefits of making instantaneous decisions and that Gladwell sums up as “a book about those first two seconds.” Lehman’s president Joe Gregory embraced this notion of going with your gut and deciding quickly, and he passed copies of Blink out on the trading floor.

The executives took this class and then hurriedly marched back to their headquarters and proceeded to make the worst snap decisions in the history of financial markets. I wanted to explore what was wrong with that lesson and to create something that would be the course that Wall Street should have taken and hopefully will take.

This time, it was Andrew Sullivan filling the role formerly played by Joe Weisenthal. His headline in The Daily Beast: “Did Malcolm Gladwell Cause The Recession?”

After seeing this all play out twice, I thought it was maybe time to ask Malcom Gladwell whether he caused Lehman to fail. Alternatively, did he merely cause the greatest recession in living memory? He replied:

First, Blink was not a book about the benefits of making instantaneous decisions. It was a book examining the power of instantaneous decisions–and a good half of the book (the last half) is devoted to all the ways that snap judgements can go awry. (The last two chapters, for example, are about how gut reactions caused the Diallo shooting and how gut reactions resulted in women being discriminated against in orchestras). The talk I gave to Lehman was along those lines: it was a talk, arising out of the book, about the “fragility” of gut decisions–and about how if they are to be useful they have to be defended against bias and corruption. Of the many journalists who have reported on that talk, you are the first to actually ask me what I spoke about. The others, I suppose, just made an instantaneous decision about what I must have said.

Put aside the lesson about media memes, and what you have here is a classic case of arrogance trumping knowledge. Check out the wonderful Wikipedia list of cognitive biases, and you’ll find dozens of reasons why it’s quite possibly a very bad idea to trust your gut. But people like Joe Gregory, no matter how much they know about such things, and no matter how astutely they can recognize them in others, still insist that they are very good at overcoming such biases themselves.

In reality, of course, they’re not. If you make decisions quickly, you will make bad decisions a lot of the time, no matter how many times you read Gladwell’s book. Grown-ups think about important decisions, and take time over them. That’s certainly the lesson of Portnoy’s book. But, it turns out, that’s exactly what Gladwell told Lehman, too.

Update: Portnoy emails to clarify that the Gladwell-Lehman story is not actually in Wait, although he was indeed inspired by it. He also writes:

Your last paragraph is dead on.  I’ve always described WAIT as a “friendly amendment” to BLINK, though I guess it’s inevitable that some people will misread (or not read) my book in the same way some misread Gladwell’s.

The media has not exactly covered itself in glory when reporting on money-related research of late. For instance, consider Martha White’s blog post at Time.com on Friday. Here’s the headline:

Would You Pay $520 in Interest to Borrow $375? 12 Million Americans Did Last Year

White cites “a payday lending report” from Pew for her datapoint — but, unforgivably, doesn’t link to it. If she had linked to it, she might have read the report a bit more carefully: it’s clear that the average interest paid on a $375 loan is $65, not $520. The $520 figure comes from multiplying the $65 number by eight, on the grounds that the average payday borrower takes out a loan eight times per year. Which in turn means that the $520 in interest is paid on $3,000 in loans, not $375 in loans.

(Update: The vast majority of payday borrowers never take out more than one loan at a time, so most of the time, the maximum principal balance is $375. The Pew report was careful to say it was talking about eight $375 loans, which is a more accurate way of putting it than saying $3,000 in loans. But it’s doing 12 million Americans a disservice to imply that they are willingly entering into deals knowing that they will pay back $520 in interest on a single $375 loan, even if that’s how it often ends up.)

Then, over the weekend, a series of stories — starting with the Observer, and moving on to Reuters and elsewhere — started writing about the trillions of dollars sitting in offshore bank accounts. All of them use the word “hidden” or its cognates, and all of them were based on a report from the Tax Justice Network (me neither), which is very long on hyperbole. This, for instance, from the main section of the report, gives a flavor of how it reads:

The subterranean system that we are trying to measure is the economic equivalent of an astrophysical black hole… The way is hard, the work is tedious, the data mining is as mind-numbing as any day below surface at the coal face…

The assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments… In terms of tackling poverty, it is hard to imagine a more pressing global issue to address.

The report does concede, grudgingly, that in fact the governments in question don’t have net debts at all: these countries, on a sovereign level and taking into account no private assets at all, are net creditors rather than net debtors. But still we’re told that “ordinary people” are shouldering massive debts which should somehow by rights be either serviced or paid off using the wealth of these countries’ plutocrats.

The reality is that the wealth of the global super-elite does not, actually, cause poverty; nor is there any obvious way of using it to alleviate poverty. Bill Gates, for instance, the richest of the lot, is putting an absolutely enormous amount of effort into trying to use his wealth to alleviate certain pockets of poverty; the jury’s still out on whether or when he might see real success on that front.

The conceit of the report is that if all offshore wealth was instead held onshore, and if that onshore wealth produced a certain amount of income, and that if all that extra income were taxed at top marginal rates, then there would be lots of lovely money for governments to spend on making poor people rich. Or something.

But the fact is that there’s a good reason why countries tax income and not wealth: for all that I personally think that a wealth tax is a very good idea, I can’t think of any country in the world, other than the USA, which could effectively levy such a thing.* The world’s wealthy don’t pay taxes on their wealth; they never have, and they never will. And because of the way they live, in a stateless cocoon, it’s a bit silly to expect them to reinvest most or all of their wealth back into their country of origin.

If you’re extremely wealthy and you come from one of the countries on the list here — Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Indonesia, Nigeria, Malaysia, Ukraine, you get the picture — then obviously you’re going to keep a huge amount of money offshore, whether you made your money in a legal or in an illicit manner. And while some of the reason might well be tax avoidance, much of it is going to be simply the fear of expropriation and/or confiscation — again, be that legal or illicit. And since your investments are going to be global, it does make sense to park your money in jurisdictions which have proven themselves good at safeguarding individual wealth, as opposed to plundering it.

The total amount of wealth in the world is not an easy number to estimate, but it’s probably somewhere in the $250 trillion range. A lot of that wealth is financial, and a lot of financial wealth is held “offshore”, whatever that means these days. This new report says that roughly $25 trillion is held offshore by the wealthy, which just means that roughly $25 trillion is held offshore: after all, poor people by definition don’t have bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. That’s an interesting datapoint, but it’s not much more than that.

What’s unhelpful and sensationalist is to lead off your press release (and therefore lots of news articles) by saying that that amount “is equivalent to the size of the United States and Japanese economies combined”. That’s just a cheap way of comparing a stock with a flow, since GDP figures don’t measure wealth at all, but rather income.

“Rich people are rich” is not much of a story, although I can see why certain people want to make it one, by reframing it in terms of inequality or tax evasion. Similarly, “poor people find it difficult to stay on top of their finances” is not news either, and there’s therefore a temptation to sex it up a bit by making it seem that people are paying more in interest than they’re borrowing in principal. But as a rule, if you see a headline about these kind of issues and the story cites a report without linking to that report, be very suspicious. There might be a lot less there than the story you’re reading would have you believe.

*Update: There are in fact six countries with a wealth tax: France, Switzerland (in certain cantons), Liechtenstein, Holland, Norway, and Italy. In none of them is it an obvious success.

I’ve just been told that it’s International Media Ethics Day in September, which is so far away that I’m bound to forget to post something. But I have been thinking a bit about media ethics of late, and especially the ever-increasing list of rules designed to ensure that journalists are neither conflicted nor seen to be conflicted. And the more I look at such things, the more I come to the conclusion that all too often they do a very good job of banning harmless activity, while at the same time proving quite ineffective against situations which are far more ethically problematic.

It’s easy to come up with a list of cases where ethics watchdogs in high places have come down too harshly on infractions which were pretty harmless. Think of Mike Albo being fired from his NYT column, or for that matter Neil Collins being fired from Reuters. In neither case did the punishment fit the crime, notwithstanding of the letter of the law as unilaterally interpreted by the news organization in question.

It’s also easy to come up with instances of news organizations tying themselves up in rather hilarious knots in order to meet their own self-imposed ethical standards. Len Downie and Mike Allen never vote, for instance, for fear that their private and secret ballot might in some way inform their journalism. And I was particularly tickled by the contortions that the WSJ went through when faced with an extremely good-natured wager by Dan Neil:

The Wall Street Journal, which I joined in February 2010, does not permit its journalists to engage in this kind of wagering, regardless of subject or beneficiary — even by critics and columnists like me who are paid to have and express their opinions. And that’s perfectly reasonable: You wouldn’t want a theater critic betting a play will succeed or fail. Moreover, it’s better for journalists to write about the story than to somehow become part of the story. However, since I undertook this obligation before my tenure at the WSJ, and since the outcome is a charitable contribution, the Journal allowed me to follow through.

There’s an implication here that if Neil had promised to pay Elon Musk $1,000, rather than Doctors Without Borders, then the WSJ would have considered his welshing on his bet to be more ethical than his making good on it. We don’t know, which is a bit problematic in itself.

The theme running through all of these cases is that of reductio ad absurdum. Organizations decide that their journalists should be above reproach, and draft a set of rules to that effect. They then consider themselves bound by the rules, rather than by the principle underlying those rules.

The risk of absurdity is particularly high when it comes to social media in general, and Twitter in particular. As Twitter inexorably erases the professional/personal distinction, sophisticated organizations are increasingly adopting social-media policies based on simple “don’t be stupid” principles, rather than on hard-and-fast rules.

What goes for Twitter goes more generally, too. Twitter has proved that journalists are human, which has upside as well as downside. Journalistic ethics should embrace that, rather than trying to force all journalists into being magisterially impartial observers.

What would ethics look like in a world which is messier and more transparent? For one thing, we would spend less effort ring-fencing journalists’ lives and conflicts, and more time simply being open about them. The end result could actually be a significant improvement.

The reason is that the single biggest problem, when it comes to journalistic bias, has nothing to do with journalists owning stock in companies, or being paid speaking fees. (Although with speaking fees, a simple would-you-be-happy-being-transparent-about-this test is often a very good place to start.) Rather, by far the most common way in which journalists are captured by corporate interests is precisely the same way that journalists get scoops: source cultivation.

Journalists don’t always have sex with their sources, but when you’re having long and often boozy meetings with people, it’s statistically inevitable that many journalists are going to end up liking some subset of those people. After all, sources aren’t necessarily bad or evil: some of them are very good, very charming people. And often journalists end up working incredibly closely with sources for weeks or months on end as stories progress. Sometimes, that work becomes formalized: after Gretchen Morgenson used Josh Rosner as a source during much of the financial crisis, she then co-authored a book with him. Other times, the source ends up marrying the journalist: think Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell.

But most of the time, it’s not nearly as obvious as that. Especially when it comes to background dinners with no particular agenda, a lot of what’s going on is a complex game of two people trying to get comfortable with trusting each other. That trust needs to be built up over time, and building it up takes a substantial amount of effort. It can be hard to distinguish, sometimes, from friendship. And if the journalist writes something bad about the source or the source’s company, the whole relationship can be jeopardized.

Keith Winstein has a fantastic way of explaining why beat reporters don’t make great investigative reporters; it basically comes down to the fact that beat reporters need access, which is the one thing that no company wants to give to an investigative reporter. But all reporters, be they beat reporters or investigative reporters or opinion journalists or anything else, have human sources and understandably feel bad if they write something that upsets the sources they get along well with. And that ends up shaping news stories, at the margin, much more than any financial incentives they might have.

Source relationships are particularly fraught when it comes to short-sellers, most of whom have good relationships with a certain subset of the financial-journalism world. That makes perfect sense: short-sellers often uncover newsworthy frauds, and it’s in everybody’s interest for those frauds to be uncovered in a public manner. But the closer a short-seller gets to a journalist, the more problematic the relationship, just because the short seller is likely to have advance notice of a key precipitating event — the publication of the story in question.

Here’s the problem: let’s say I’m a short seller, and I’ve uncovered a big fraud. I can go short the stock, but doing so is fraught with danger: so long as the fraud isn’t public, the stock can rise a lot and I can get stopped out. And if I simply sit back and wait for some journalist or government agency to find the fraud on their own, I could be waiting a very long time indeed. So I make things happen by talking to a journalist I know I can trust. And somewhere along the way I get a reasonably good idea for when that journalist’s story is going to appear — a story which I’m pretty sure is going to result in the company’s share price falling. At that point, I have the holy grail for any short-seller: knowing not only that a stock is going to fall, but also when it’s going to fall. And I have that information just because of how close I am to the journalist. You can see how the journalist, in this light, looks a bit less like the impartial crusader of Truth, and a bit more like the willing patsy of the short-seller.

I don’t know how or even whether this problem can or should be addressed, but I suspect that a bit more transparency could only help. And that’s not the only area where more transparency would surely be a good thing. I’m a long-time reader and fan of Joe Nocera, for instance, and so I know that he has featured Westwood Capital’s Dan Alpert in his column numerous times, as well as letting Alpert guest-blog for him on occasion. Last August, Nocera introduced him, quite explicitly, as “my friend Daniel Alpert”.

Yesterday, Nocera wrote about the eminent-domain plan for seizing underwater mortgages; he concluded that “it’s time to give eminent domain a try”. In doing so, he ducked all of the questions I’ve raised about the plan he’s writing about: how Mortgage Resolution Partners is buying mortgages rather than homes, and performing mortgages rather than defaulted mortgages, and indeed is trying to buy performing mortgages for a fraction of their face value, even as investors are valuing them at or even sometimes above par. “Since the home has dropped dramatically in value, the mortgage is worth a lot less than its face value,” asserts Nocera — ignoring the fact that once a mortgage is seasoned and performing well, it has to be worth at least as much as a performing unsecured loan of the same amount.

Why was Nocera so seemingly blind to the weaknesses in the MRP plan? Maybe he considered and rejected them; maybe he didn’t consider them at all. Or, maybe, he was predisposed to like the MRP plan because his friend Dan Alpert is one of the principal movers behind it. I knew that Nocera had written about the MRP plan before I knew what Nocera had written about the MRP plan — but because I also knew about the Nocera-Alpert connection, I didn’t need to read the column to know what Nocera’s conclusion would be. Nocera was under no compulsion to write about the plan, and I’m reasonably certain that if he can’t say something nice about Dan Alpert, he’s not going to say anything at all.

Dan Alpert wasn’t mentioned in Nocera’s column, and neither was his company, so even a close reader of Nocera’s work would have found it difficult to notice what you might call the friendship conflict. Nocera gives paid speeches, including to securitization professionals, and I don’t think that the money he gets paid for giving those speeches affects his columns one bit — any more than his cruise-ship seminars do. But the NYT keeps very close tabs on all that extracurricular income, because it’s seen as raising potential ethical issues. Nocera’s connection with Alpert, on the other hand, isn’t scrutinized at all — it’s a perfectly unexceptional journalist-source relationship — despite the fact that it must have had some significant effect on the column.

This, then, is where a bit of first-person transparency would come in useful. “I’m biased: I’ve known Dan Alpert for years, and he’s a friend. But I still think this is a good idea.” It doesn’t take up much space, it’s perfectly natural, and it helps readers understand where the writer is coming from.

Was it unethical for Nocera not to disclose his relationship with Alpert? I wouldn’t go that far. But then again, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to try to draw rules-based bright lines between “ethical” and “unethical”, and say that anything on one side of the line is fine, while anything on the other side of the line is unacceptable. We don’t want journalists to become like corporate executives, who, in the words of Eduardo Porter, “behave as corruptly as they can, within whatever constraints are imposed by law and reputation”.

Instead, I’d encourage all journalists to consider every action they do, every day, and ask whether it’s helpful or unhelpful, good or bad, at the margin. And the point here is to spend as much time trying to do things which are good as you do avoiding things which are bad.

Right now, US journalism has a rather Calvinist view of ethics: it’s all downside and no upside. But it seems to me that if publications encouraged their journalists to be more ethical, rather than just requiring them not to be unethical, things might get a lot better. We’d see more detailed disclosures like Kara Swisher’s at All Things D. We’d see fewer anonymous quotes, since there’s always something a bit dirty and secretive about them. We’d have fewer journalists automatically saying “yes” whenever anybody asked them if they could talk off the record. And we’d have columnists like Nocera explain their personal connections to the subjects they were writing about, even when doing so isn’t strictly necessary: it would still at the margin be better than not doing so.

My suggestion for Media Ethics Day, then, is that, this year, we stop talking about rules: what behaviors are OK, and what behaviors aren’t. I don’t have a problem with those rules existing, but I worry that an unintended consequence of putting those rules in place is that journalists end up worrying much more about the rules, and what side of the rules they’re on, than they do about the underlying ethics of what it is that they’re doing, or not doing. Similarly, I’d like to see a little less emphasis on what constitutes unethical behavior in journalism. While that’s an important topic, it’s also a constrained one. What I want to see more of is discussion of what constitutes ethical behavior in journalism — what kind of things can all journalists do to make their practice ever more ethically sound?

I’d particularly love to see that conversation take place in the context of an increasingly social world, where friendships and relationships are more out in the open than they have been in the past, and where grown-ups recognize that conflicts are a fact of life, rather than something which should always be avoided.

If you study ethics in a philosophy department, it’s a tough nut to crack, with lots of very difficult questions. In a journalistic context, by contrast, everybody seems far too keen to boil everything down to simple yes/no answers.

On Thursday, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, you could hear the machinery creaking as pundits around the web felt the need to respond. I took the media angle, deducing from seven minutes of CNN (which I didn’t even watch) that “TV news is ultimately much more an arm of the entertainment industry than it is of the news industry”, and that “if you want to be a journalist, don’t work in TV”. And over at Bloomberg View, Stephen Carter declared that “the most fascinating aspect” of the 193-page decision — which I’m sure he hadn’t read in full — was the fact that it hadn’t leaked:

Smack in the middle of a city where leaks are a way of life, here was a pending action that pundits were proclaiming would determine President Barack Obama’s legacy, and the capital’s legion of political reporters was unable to ferret out the smallest advance hint of the court’s intentions — even though the initial vote probably came three months ago. The justices themselves, their law clerks and all the personnel of the court cooperate in maintaining the veil…

Just as nobody can watch the video, neither does the court leak. These two facts are of a piece.

This afternoon, with a single deeply-reported article, Jan Crawford of CBS News proved us both wrong. Her 2,400-word piece is as good a piece of legal journalism as I’ve seen, and confirms what some had suspected: that Chief Justice Roberts changed his mind with respect to his decision. She adds lots of fascinating detail about how everything went down: after he changed his mind, Crawford reports, Roberts was heavily lobbied by the judges who wanted to strike down the law, who wanted to coax him back into their own fold.

Carter’s glowing view of his fellow jurists is in large part justified, not only at the Supreme Court level but also throughout the federal judiciary. Lawyers, it turns out, tend to be good at keeping secrets. On the other hand, partisan politicians are not. And it seems very much as though the more partisan Republicans within the Supreme Court have in this case behaved more like politicians than like jurists.

Roberts’s action “stirred the ire of the conservative justices”, says Crawford, who reports on what happened “in the Court’s private conference immediately after the arguments”, where only the nine justices are present. And that’s not the only secret conversation that leaked:

It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation.

Crawford was also given the code to unlock the secret message in the unsigned dissent:

The fact that the joint dissent doesn’t mention Roberts’ majority was not a sign of sloppiness, the sources said, but instead was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him.

As Crawford says, “the justices are notoriously close-lipped, and their law clerks must agree to keep matters completely confidential”. And yet, we’re now seeing these coordinated and perfectly-timed leaks from within the Court, detailing information known only to the justices themselves. The conservative justices are leaking, and although Crawford talks about “law clerks, chambers’ aides and secretaries” who have been gossiping internally about Roberts’s change of mind, it’s pretty clear that her sources were impeccable and that if they weren’t the conservative justices themselves, they were sources who had the explicit consent of those justices to start talking to the press.

Carter’s article bemoaned the ubiquity of leaking in Washington, describing it as “despicable”, and saying that “one reason to admire the court, even when one disagrees with it, is its ability to withstand the temptation to which other government bodies regularly yield.” He concludes his column by saying that “the rest of Washington would do well to learn from the court’s example”.

Instead, it seems, the Supreme Court has become infected by exactly the same partisanship which has corroded civic life everywhere else in DC. Maybe that was inevitable. But this story is still a signal journalistic accomplishment — and it was written at law-geeky length by a TV reporter. Crawford deserves all credit for getting this scoop — and for showing that there is life yet in broadcast journalism.

There’s no secret why Rupert Murdoch is breaking News Corp into two pieces. Amy Chozick explains:

News Corporation had evolved into a successful entertainment company with a newspaper problem, several people close to the company have said.

“The idea this was this integrated media company isn’t true,” said one of those people, who was briefed on News Corporation’s strategy but could not discuss its internal dynamics for attribution. “Everything else managed to do well, and the newspapers had become difficult and even toxic.”

It’s worth underscoring the fact, here, that Fox News, Sky News, and Fox Business are going to end up on the entertainment, rather than the news, side of the divide, while The Daily and HarperCollins join what News Corp describes as “some of the world’s most successful print, digital and information services brands”.

What does this mean for the much-vaunted Digital Convergence? It’s certainly happening in the narrow sense that we will all ultimately get our news and entertainment from things called “screens”, whether they’re phones or tablets or TVs or something as-yet uninvented. But the whole point about screens is that you don’t really look at the screen, rather than through it — to the content being displayed. And nothing shows the power of different types of news than what happened this morning, when the news broke that the Supreme Court had upheld Obama’s healthcare law.

As a rule, everything on the news side of Murdoch’s news/entertainment divide got it right, and everything on the entertainment side got it wrong. If you were watching ScotusBlog, or following the updates from Reuters, or even just trying to keep up with the flood of information on Twitter, the nuances of the decision came out quickly and accurately. If you were watching Fox News, on the other hand, or CNN, you would have been very confused by downright inaccurate reporting.

This is because TV news is ultimately much more an arm of the entertainment industry than it is of the news industry. Its star anchors get paid millions of dollars because they’re popular on TV, not because of their reporting skills; and while the occasional news magazine program will sometimes break news, newspapers and websites have always been the undisputed leaders on that front.

TV is still the leader in one area of news, however, and that’s live events. Which is why the CNN error caused such a big stir: because the timing of the Supreme Court decision was known in advance, there was a lot of anticipation about what the ruling might be, and Americans are hard-wired in such situations to turn to CNN, their trusted source for live, breaking, non-exclusive news. Liveblogs are all well and good, but live video by its nature is just a much more powerful medium for such events than anything text-based.

As we saw with CNN this morning, however, it also has serious reliability problems. And if we fast-forward to how the bipartite News Corp will look in a couple of years, I suspect that the WSJ’s live video feed covering the Supreme Court will be a much more reliable and intelligent guide to what’s going on than anything on Fox or even on CNN.

In other words, print media is converging on TV news, and will ultimately become the kind of trusted source of live-breaking news that CNN used to be. Meanwhile, TV news is never going to converge on the rest of the news industry; instead, it will drift further and further into the realm of entertainment.

All of which is to say that if you want to be a journalist, don’t work in TV. The pay might be better there, but if there’s any real journalism going on there right now, there probably won’t be in a few years’ time.

“In a way,” says Jeffrey Goldfarb today, “the scandal may have been the best thing to happen to News Corp,” on the grounds that Hackgate is likely to end up forcing Rupert Murdoch to spin off his newspapers, along with HarperCollins, into a new, separate company.

I can see what Goldfarb means: it’s probably fair enough, if you’re writing for a service like BreakingViews, to assume that whatever is good for a company’s share price is good for that company. But from a journalistic perspective, the news at News is much less good.

I was at the Loeb Awards gala dinner tonight, where the WSJ’s Jerry Seib won the Lifetime Achievement Award. He’s been at the WSJ since 1978, and in his acceptance speech he talked about the culture shock which descended upon the newspaper after it was bought by Murdoch. At the same time, however, he welcomed it: “there’s a reason it’s called the News Corporation,” he said — and he’s right. Murdoch, at heart, is a news man, and although most of his wealth is attributable to sports and entertainment, it’s clear that his heart is very much in journalism. Moreso, it should probably be said, than most of the Bancrofts who sold him the Journal.

In the short term, this makes sense. It would give the entertainment company more latitude to operate without the reputational baggage associated with News International, and if anything it would allow Rupert Murdoch to further consolidate his control of his newspapers, since the valuation of the spun-off company would be low enough that he could quite easily take it entirely private, if he wanted. Rupert Murdoch won’t be any poorer after this deal is done — in fact, he’ll be richer, thanks to the eradication of the “Murdoch discount” — and so his newspapers’ charmed lives as playthings of a billionaire who doesn’t care much about ROE is likely to continue either way.

But so long as the print properties remain public, shareholders are going to be even noisier about making them pay than they are right now. At the moment, News Corp shareholders mostly just want the newspapers to go away. But after the spin-off, shareholders in the new company will be agitating noisily for profits. Murdoch will ignore them, of course — but that kind of thing is difficult to ignore entirely.

Up until now, Murdoch has never really needed to worry very much about his newspapers’ profitability, because the rest of his empire was throwing off such enormous profits. That’s going to change. Even if he does take the papers private, none of his heirs particularly wants to inherit them. There’s a big question mark over the papers’ future, now, which will only grow as Murdoch gets older.

There’s also the fascinating question of what’s going to happen with Fox News. When News Corp loses most of its news properties, only Fox News and Sky News are likely to remain — and when big broadcast companies own news operations, those news operations tend not to perform very well. The fact that news is part of News Corp’s DNA has surely been a crucial factor in Fox News’s success; now that’s coming to an end, Fox News’s new overseers might view the channel in a significantly different light.

Again, nothing is going to happen overnight: Murdoch will continue to have personal control of both companies, and both will be run exactly the way he wants them to be run. But in the world of journalistic business models, I’ve always been a fan of being owned by a benign gazillionaire, who cares about more than just profits. Both Bloomberg and Reuters fall into that category, as do outfits such as the Atlantic, Condé Nast, and The New Republic. But Murdoch has always been the first billionaire you think of when you think “press baron”. And it’s foolish to believe that a change as big as this at the corporate-structure level will have no effect on his individual properties.

In the wake of the revelations that Jonah Lehrer is a serial self-plagiarist, Josh Levin declares that if you’re an “ideas man”, you shouldn’t be a blogger:

For professional thinkers like Gladwell and Lehrer, the key to maintaining a remunerative career is to milk your best ideas until there’s no liquid left and pray you’ve bought yourself enough time to conjure up new ones.

Given that continuous cycle of creation and reuse, blogging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired. For Lehrer and The New Yorker, the best prescription is to shut down Frontal Cortex and give him some time to come up with some fresh ideas. The man’s brain clearly needs a break.

While I’m sympathetic to Levin’s point here, I think his prescription is entirely wrong. The problem with Jonah Lehrer, like the problem with Zach Kouwe, is not that he was humbled by the insatiable demands of Blog. Instead, it’s that he made a category error, and tried to use a regular blog as a vehicle for the kind of writing that should not be done in blog format. Lehrer shouldn’t shut down Frontal Cortex; he should simply change it to become a real blog. And if he does that, he’s likely to find that blogs in fact are wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time.

If you look at the post which started the whole controversy, you’ll find a honed and self-contained 1,100-word meditation on science and intuition. It’s basically a mini-New Yorker article, and in that it’s very similar to all the other blog posts which Lehrer has written for TNY. Which is to say, none of them are very bloggish. There’s a formula to them, too: start with a news hook. Declare that it’s indicative of a deeper, broader phenomenon. Talk about some scientists who have studied that phenomenon, and what those scientists have found. Tie it all up with a neat conclusion.

Given that formula, it’s a bit easier to understand why Lehrer felt driven to self-plagiarism. The art of blogging is basically the art of glossing the news: finding something out there on the internet, and then saying something interesting about it. Lehrer has a collection of interesting-things-to-say, and at any given point it’s quite easy to apply one of those things to something going on somewhere. And if you’ve already said that thing in the best way that you can, it’s a bit silly to say it a worse way just for the sake of not repeating yourself.

But there’s an easy way out of this problem: break the formula, which isn’t very bloggish in the first place. For one thing, Lehrer’s posts seem designed to make you not want to click on his links — he’s not sharing his excitement at finding something new, so much as delivering a seminar on ideas he’s had for some time, and which he feels confident expounding upon.

So here, then, are some ideas for how Lehrer’s blog might become much better.

Firstly, think of it as reading, rather than writing. Lehrer is a wide-ranging polymath: he is sent, and stumbles across, all manner of interesting things every day. Right now, I suspect, he files those things away somewhere and wonders whether one day he might be able to use them for another Big Idea piece. Make the blog the place where you file them away. Those posts can be much shorter than the things Lehrer’s writing right now: basically, just an excited “hey look at this”, with maybe a short description of why it’s interesting. It’s OK if the meat of what you’re blogging is elsewhere, rather than on your own blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point.

Secondly, use links as shorthand. Kouwe and Lehrer were both brought down by the fact that they felt the need to re-write what had already been written elsewhere. On the web, you never need to do that. If you or someone else has already written something well, just link to that, rather than feeling the need to repeat it.

Thirdly, use the blog to interact with your peers, rather than just primary sources. There are hundreds of great science and ideas blogs out there already; start reading them, and be generous about linking to them. Your readers will thank you. When you see an article you wish you’d written, link to it and say so. When someone finds a fantastic paper and writes it up in a slightly incomplete way, credit them with the great find, and then fill in the blanks. When two or three people are all talking about the same thing, sum up what the debate is, and explain where you stand.

Fourthly, iterate. Lehrer is a big-name journalist at a major publication: when he writes stuff, people respond, often on their own blogs, and often with very keen intelligence. Link to those people, learn from them, converse with them via the medium of blog, and use that collaboration and conversation to hone and further develop your own ideas. Treat every blog post as the beginning of a process, rather than as the end of one.

As the editors of the American Chemical Society write, self-plagiarising is fraud, because it is “an intentional attempt to deceive a reader by implying that new information is being presented”. A blogger should never feel the need to do that, because blogging is not at heart about delivering new information, so much as it is about finding and linking and connecting and conversing. Once you internalize that, self-plagiarism becomes a non-issue.