Felix Salmon

If you want a masterclass in old-school econoblogging, check out this fantastic post from Dealbreaker’s Matt Levine.

Econoblogging, at its best, is conversational, wonky, funny, illuminating, and full of links to things you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed; Matt’s post is all of these things. And it’s even a little bit frisky: the post acts as a comprehensive dismantling of Greg Mankiw’s disingenuous claim that the rich are getting poorer. (Yes, that really is Mankiw’s headline.)

Matt attacks the claim with Dealbreaker-strength snark, of course.

With a lot of attention on the CBO report finding that out that income inequality has increased dramatically in the past 30 years, you might have a momentary lapse and think something like “say, maybe those protesters are onto something.” Resist the urge!

But there’s real substance in the post, too. Matt reads the paper that Mankiw’s citing, fairly describes its conclusions — and then comes up with his own, rather more compelling, theory as to what’s going on. And he manages to credibly tie the whole thing to Mitt Romney, too, giving him all the excuse he needs to run that picture again.

Along the way, Matt links to the CBO (of course, but try finding that link in your daily newspaper), Deal Journal (twice), ZeroHedge, New York Magazine, the Economist, CNBC, and an HBS paper. Most prominently, he both links to and quotes from a decidedly underappreciated blog called The Slack Wire, which will surely get lots of new followers from this post.

He does the whole thing with great elegance, explaining complex ideas in very plain English, in an approachable manner which never talks down to the reader. And he’s judicious, too. This is as good a one-sentence take on the evolution of the 1% over the past 30 years as you’re likely to see:

If you believe – whatever your political take on it – that in the early 1980s the U.S. shifted from a tradition-driven economy where the working rich managed their firms for plodding stability (and were paid with a fixed and comfortable salary) and the idle rich invested in Treasuries, to a shareholder-value-driven economy where the working rich managed their firms for quarterly earnings target (and were paid with options and incentive comp) and the idle rich invested in hedge funds, then that would explain the rise in volatility: the rich went from being basically creditors on the economy to being shareholders.

Matt’s the perfect complement to Bess Levin at Dealbreaker: it took them an incredibly long time to find him, but they really got it right here. I just hope he doesn’t get poached by some deep-pocketed mainstream news organization which will end up stifling the very thing he’s best at.

Here’s what I don’t get about the NYT’s silly nastygram targeting HuffPo’s new Parentlode blog. It ends like this:

If I have not received a response to these demands within three (3) business days of receipt of this letter, we will have no choice but to pursue all available legal remedies.

This, it seems, puts the NYT, and its legal office, in something of a bind. It’s extremely unlikely that they’re going to get a response to their demands within three (3) business days, or, frankly, ever. Which means that the NYT will have two choices. Either it does nothing — and implicitly admit that its nastygrams are all bark and no bite. Or else it launches a spectacularly pointless and expensive trademark-infringement lawsuit against a blog with a really stupid name, on the grounds that the stupid name (“Parentlode”) is designed “to create an association in the minds of readers” with the NYT’s old Motherlode blog.

Of course the Parentlode name is designed to create that association. As is the rather more germane fact that Parentlode is being written by Lisa Belkin, who founded Motherlode.

Blog names do, of course, have a tendency to follow their authors around. Adam Clark Estes makes a very good point:

Learning the digital ropes, building a devoted audience, tending your personal brand: these are all the sorts of things that journalists are supposed to be doing to adapt to the new news climate. It’s exactly what Andrew Sullivan, who had moved his Daily Dish brand from Time to The Atlantic to The Daily Beast, has done. So too Mickey Kaus who’s ported his Kausfiles moniker from Slate to Newsweek and now The Daily Caller. If Belkin made a mistake it was not initially insisting that she could take “Motherlode” with her if she ever left The Times, as the Freakonomics guys did when they moved their branded blog from The Times to their own site.

We’ve even done it here at Reuters: Matt Goldstein has a blog called Unstructured Finance, which is the same as the name of his old blog at Businessweek; I’m quite sure we’re not going to get sued by Bloomberg as a result.

The NYT lawsuit, then, is pure peevishness — and I don’t understand why that’s an attitude they’re interested in communicating to the world. What’s more, it’s a clear sign that the NYT is still very uncomfortable with helping to build personal brands. Here’s a bit more of the C&D:

Amazingly, Ms. Belkin explicitly draws attention to the connection to the NYTimes.com blog in her first posting today and encourages the false impression that the HuffPo blog is a continuation of the Motherlode blog, albeit with a new name.

False impression? I’d say that’s a true impression. If a blogger moves her blog from one publication to another, then it’s reasonable to consider the new blog a continuation of the old one. This blog, for instance, is very much a continuation of my old blog at Portfolio.com. It features a bunch of cross-posts from when I was at Portfolio, and Portfolio ran a bunch of cross-posts from here after I moved. Even as they hired Ryan Avent to continue to blog at my old home over there.

Obviously, the NYT and HuffPo aren’t nearly as collegial as Portfolio and Reuters were. But there’s a deeper difference: Portfolio was owned by Conde Nast, which is deeply invested in creating individual brands and turning its writers and bloggers into stars. Conde understands that if you want to keep and attract stars, you do that by treating them very well. The NYT, by contrast, seems to think that it’s a good idea to punish its erstwhile blog stars by threatening their new employer with lawsuits. It’s a strategy which can’t help but damage the NYT’s reputation as a great home for writers. Which is yet another reason why it’s so stupid.

Netflix released its third-quarter results this afternoon, showing net income of $62 million, down slightly from the second quarter’s $68 million. And things are going to get much worse before they get better: “We expect to report a global consolidated net loss,” the company said, in the first quarter of 2012. Maybe the company shouldn’t have spent $40 million, over the course of the third quarter, buying back 182,000 shares at an average price of $218 apiece. (In the wake of today’s results, they’re trading in the $80s.)

In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings let the bubblicious stock price — it briefly topped $300/share at the beginning of the quarter — go to his head. The company was swimming in money! And so, in September, Hastings signed a deal to pay $30 million per movie for everything that DreamWorks creates, in return for the right to stream those movies a few months after they’re released on DVD. It’s known as the “pay-TV window”, and in order to wrest those rights from HBO, Netflix had to outbid HBO, which was reportedly paying something in the neighborhood of $20 million per movie.

It wasn’t even the first time that Netflix went head-to-head against HBO in a bidding war: Hastings says that HBO was an underbidder back in March, when Netflix won the exclusive rights to TV series House of Cards. And in the case of the DreamWorks deal, remember that Netflix already gets all those DVDs the day they come out, long before streaming will be allowed. The $30 million per movie was just for the Netflix customers who have streaming and who either don’t have the DVD service, or who want to watch the movie but haven’t got around to watching it on DVD yet.

A lot of ink has been spilled over Netflix’s decision to separate its DVD and streaming businesses, and to increase its prices sharply. Those decisions are, surely, the proximate cause for its torrid present. But the big-money deals show the same amount of arrogance, with even less business justification. It’s obvious why companies raise prices: they think they’re going to make more money that way. But why would Netflix spend hundreds of millions of dollars preventing movies and TV shows from being shown on HBO? That’s much less obvious.

When he’s on the record, Hastings loves to say that his core market is simply people who want “unlimited streaming for $8 a month and a vast catalog”. Movies and TV shows are nonrival: if all he’s interested in doing is maximizing the size of his catalog, then there’s no need for Hastings to exclude HBO from running the exact same content. But flush with a soaring stock price, Hastings decided that he was willing to pay eye-popping sums of money to turn his nonrival good into an excludable good: if he has it, then HBO can’t have it too.

I can see why people might want to spend small amounts of money to do that. A certain part of Netflix’s actual and potential subscriber base has HBO, and some of those people will decide that HBO is good enough for them and that they don’t need Netflix as well, and maybe if Netflix keeps House of Cards from HBO then some of that subset will decide to subscribe to both, and Netflix will get extra subscribers. But there’s no way the economics can be worth the kind of sums being bandied about here.

Indeed, the whole DreamWorks deal, in particular, seems Pareto sub-optimal for all concerned. Wouldn’t all three parties have been better off if DreamWorks had agreed to license its movies in the pay-TV window to both HBO and Netflix? If Dreamworks got, say, $15 million from HBO and $25 million from Netflix, then DreamWorks would have made an extra $10 million per movie, while both HBO and Netflix would have gotten the movies for $5 million less each than they were willing to pay.

My guess is that it’s HBO which prevented such a deal from happening — it’s owned by Time Warner, which has its own interest in preserving big-media monopolies as a matter of principle. But I doubt that Netflix fought very hard to abolish the exclusivity provision — no matter how much money it was spending on content, its market capitalization was rising even faster, so the market was saying that it was doing something right.

Now, however, things are different. The market doesn’t trust Netflix to run itself efficiently and effectively any more, and deals like these are going to be scrutinized a lot more closely. As a result, I suspect Netflix will be much more open to sharing content with Time Warner than it has been up until now. Whether Time Warner is in any mood to reciprocate, however, remains to be seen.

I’ve been saying for a while that blogs are dead — certainly the one-person, one-voice blog, and also the big splashy expensive blog launched by a new or old-media company. Both I think had their heyday a few years ago. But as bloggish tendencies get incorporated into the broader news business, and as the sharing-and-linking part of the blogosphere moves to social media, something quite encouraging is happening: media organizations are finding it easy to set up small, light blogs which they’re not particularly invested in.

On the basis of 2=trend, I present to you: Overheard, the new blog from the WSJ’s Heard on the Street team; and Occupy Wall Street: The Wealth Debate, from Bloomberg Businessweek. Both are places where shorter-form quick hits can get published without laborious editing; neither are particularly important strategically; but both fill an empty niche in terms of their organization’s coverage in a cheap and effective manner.

This is a lot easier than having to re-architect the broader news outlet to make it more amenable to such materials. All websites have some kind of blog content, so if you need something fast, adding a new blog should be pretty easy. And it doesn’t involve lots of unreliable technology from outside vendors, either, which is always an advantage.

Well done, then, to the WSJ and Businessweek for seeing how blog technology is a good way of powering things which don’t need to last forever, or get lots of traffic — they’re just another part of the big package which the newsroom provides.

I doubt many people will bookmark either of these blogs, but that’s fine — individual posts will get shared socially and placed on the home page, the news will get covered effectively, and that’s all that’s needed. These aren’t throwaway microsites — they’re important to the broader function of the newsroom. But they’re also small enough to experiment and push the envelope with respect to voice and content type. And if certain ideas work well on these blogs, they can always percolate up to the rest of the site over time.

Post updated, see below

USA Today’s Dennis Cauchon has a very odd story today, headlined “Student loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion this year”:

The amount of student loans taken out last year crossed the $100 billion mark for the first time and total loans outstanding will exceed $1 trillion for the first time this year. Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards, reports the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Note Cauchon’s link, there — it’s meant to take you to the USA Today page for the New York Fed, although for me I just get a 404. What it doesn’t do is take you to the NY Fed’s own website, or give any indication of what data Cauchon thinks he’s using. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, Cauchon’s facts — including the headline on the piece — are simply not true. Here’s the NY Fed’s data, in Excel form, and here’s a chart I just put together, from the NY Fed data:

This chart shows the total stock of credit-card and student-loan debt, up to the second quarter of 2011. The most recent figures show total credit-card debt at $690 billion, and total student-loan debt at $550 billion. It is not true that Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards, and total student-loan debt isn’t even close to $1 trillion.

Unfortunately, Cauchon’s article is seeping into the blogosphere: Suzy Khimm picked up on it today, and Kevin Drum and Eyder Peralta followed her lead, asking for “more analysis, please”. Which is always a good thing to ask for, when USA Today can’t get its facts straight.

As for what the real facts show, I think it’s pretty clear: the stock of student loans outstanding continues to increase at a pretty much the same pace it’s been rising at for the past six or seven years. It doesn’t seem to have accelerated with the rise of private-sector online universities, but at the same time it also shows few signs of declining along with credit-card and mortgage debt. And of course it’s also much harder to discharge than mortgage or credit-card debt. It’s a problem, I think. But it’s not a trillion-dollar problem, and it shows no sign of becoming a trillion-dollar problem any time soon.

Update: It turns out that the NY Fed data, which Cauchon cited, is wrong, and is about to be revised; when that happens the total amount of student loans will rise to more than the level of credit-card debt, but still less than $1 trillion. Details here.

Ben Furnas only has 325 followers on Twitter, but that’s all it took to make this photo of his go seriously viral over the past few days. He posted it on Twitter at 5:42pm on Saturday, with no commentary other than the hashtags #ows and #win. It didn’t take long (I’m a little bit unclear about the timezone of BoingBoing timestamps) before Xeni Jardin posted it on her hugely popular blog. And from there it went, well, everywhere.

By this morning, Conor Friedersdorf, the author of the words in question, was already writing a meta-post about the photo, and how it demonstrates that OWS is “the product of the decentralized networked-era culture”. Xeni, too, had a meta-post of her own. And the makers of the sign were revealed to be Brooklynites Will Spitz and Caitlin Curran. (Sorry, they’re a couple.)

Still, the meme was far from out of juice: when I posted the photo on my Tumblr at 4pm this afternoon, grabbing it from Barry Ritholtz, it very quickly became by far the most liked and shared thing I’ve ever put up on that platform.

A lot of that is because Curran is one of those protestors that photographers dream of. And then there’s the setting — Times Square, with Starbucks in the background and the big Nasdaq sign.

But the heart of the photo is the language on the sign — language much more powerful and striking than the blog post (or even the sentence) from which it was lifted. It’s funny, on the sign — something true, and accurate, and touching, and grammatical, and far too long to be a slogan, and gloriously bereft of punctuation, and ending even more gloriously in a mildly archaic preposition. Friedersdorf has managed to encapsulate the essence and the impropriety of the Abacus deal in just 45 words, and it’s fantastic that Spitz and Curran — and Furnas and Jardin and everybody who shared this image — managed to give those words the global recognition they deserved.

And most wonderfully of all, this sign seems to resonate just as much with the general public, most of whom have never heard of Abacus, as it does with Abacus nerds like myself.

In any case, I’m very glad that Abacus is coming back. During the first Abacus-go-round, I toyed with the idea of making a self-indulgent derivative artwork of the famous quote by “Fab” Fabrice Tourre:

What if we created a “thing”, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?

I’d print these words in a sans-serif face on aluminum, or maybe in neon, and use them to comment not only on the futility of Wall Street, but also on the parallels between Wall Street and the art world. (William Powhida is much better at this sort of thing than I am; his show, called Derivatives, which includes my birthday present, opens Saturday at Postmasters, and you should go check it out. )

This picture is a vastly better way of bringing Abacus to the public’s attention. And it’s also a fantastic example of why it’s great that OWS isn’t a carefully-organized movement with an easily-identifiable and discrete set of demands. The fact that OWS is open-ended means that it’s much more open to the kind of creativity which went into this sign, and also means that snapshots like this one are much more likely to go viral.

The sentiment behind OWS has resonated worldwide — and I’m sure that this photo has already been forwarded all over Goldman Sachs. It’s a very healthy reminder, for squids both junior and senior, that the world will not soon forget what they got up to at the end of the subprime boom.

Jack Shafer has an unforgiving take on l’affaire Kendra Marr:

The plagiarist defrauds readers by leading them to believe that he has come by the facts of his story first-hand–that he vouches for the accuracy of the facts and interpretations under his byline. But this is not the case. Generally, the plagiarist doesn’t know whether the copy he’s lifted has gotten the story right because he hasn’t really investigated the topic. (If he had, he could write the story himself.) In such cases he must attribute the material he borrows so that at the very least the reader can hold somebody accountable for the facts in a story.

Or to put it another way, a journalist who does original work essentially claims, this is true, according to me. The conscientious journalist who cites the work of others essentially makes the claim that this is true, according to somebody else. The plagiarist makes no such claims in his work. By having no sources of his own and failing to point to the source he stole from, he breaks the “chain of evidence” that allows readers to contest or verify facts. By doing so, he produces worthless copy that wastes the time of his readers. And that’s the crime.

This is all true. But Marr reminds me of Zack Kouwe more than anything else. And if Marr pulled a Kouwe, she isn’t guilty of the crime that Shafer is accusing her of.

Kouwe was never cut out to be a blogger. When he saw a good story on some other site, he would re-report it, rather than just link to it. And I suspect that what happened with Marr was similar.

Let’s say that Marr saw a NYT story about Senator X. She thinks it’s an important story, she phones up Senator X’s office, asks them if the story is true, and they say yes. The right thing to do, in that case, is to link to the NYT story, and say that you’ve confirmed it with your own sources. The wrong thing to do is to try to rewrite the story yourself, since you haven’t really reported it, and you don’t really know what you’re talking about. And the way you get caught doing the wrong thing is by using NYT copy wholesale, without attribution. Then you can get done for plagiarism.

But still, you did confirm the facts in the story; you can, with honesty, say this is true, according to me.

What we saw with Kouwe, and what I think we’re seeing with Marr, is a peculiar new form of plagiarism — one that exists only in a world of continuous news. In the olden days, if you saw a story in the NYT and wanted to copy it, you would have to wait a whole day until your own paper came out, and that would give you lots of time to do your own reporting and write your own story. These days, there’s a lot of pressure, at places like Dealbook and Politico, to match stories quickly — so quickly that it’s significantly easier to just copy-and-paste your rival’s material than it is to craft your own story when you’re not much of an expert on it in the first place.

In the age of the link, such activity should never need to happen. But there’s a reason that the plagiarist copies rather than linking. And the reason is that linking and aggregation is still not remotely as respected, in newsrooms, as reporting is. So some young reporters, wanting to make a name for themselves, plagiarize instead of linking, in an attempt to take credit for the work of others. It’s still — quite rightly — a firing offense. But it’s not quite — or not necessarily — the crime that Shafer hates so much. It can just be a horrible side-effect of link-phobia, which exists even at web-native publications like Politico.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Occupy Wall Street — the soi-disant “99%” — were being secretly funded by billionaire Davos Man George Soros, exemplar of the 1%? Well, no, it wouldn’t, actually. As Noreen Malone points out, lots of the 1% have, like Soros, expressed sympathy with OWS, including Bill Clinton, Ben Bernanke, and at least one member of the Buffett family. And when you’re sympathetic to a cause, and have lots of money, often you donate money to that cause.

But in this case it looks very much as though there’s no connection at all between Soros and OWS. That makes sense: for one thing, Soros is a creature of Wall Street himself, and for another, he tends to fund well-organized groups with specific goals. Which, clearly, OWS isn’t.

Which is why today’s Reuters story about the connection between Soros and OWS has elicited so much derision around the blogosphere. Beyond allowing us to shoehorn the #ows and #soros hashtags into a single tweet, there’s no real substance to it at all:

There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

Yes, there are people — led, it would seem, by Rush Limbaugh — who are loudly speculating that Soros is funding OWS. There might conceivably be a story in their rabble-rousing, which could point out that Soros’s agenda is hardly secret — it’s right there on his website for all to see.

Alternatively, as John Carney points out, there’s an interesting story in the way that OWS has raised money, through crowdsourced means like Kickstarter.

But the angle we went with is not a story, especially since Soros says he’s never even heard of Adbusters.

According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros’ Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based group that acts almost like a clearing house for other donors, directing their contributions to liberal non-profit groups. Among others the Tides Center has partnered with are the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

Disclosure documents also show Tides, which declined comment, gave Adbusters grants of $185,000 from 2001-2010, including nearly $26,000 between 2007-2009.

The Tides Center is not some great sloshing pool of money which takes in money and hands it out. Yes, one of the many things that it offers foundations is the opportunity to create collective action funds, enabling a group of donors to channel their money in a collaborative manner. The fact that Soros gave money to Tides and that Tides gave money to Adbusters in no way means that there’s an “indirect financial link” between the two. That’s like saying that there’s an “indirect financial link” between me and Mitt Romney, because I lend money to Citigroup (I’m a depositor at Citibank), and Citigroup has given money to Romney.

Besides, OWS wasn’t even dreamed of back in 2009. If somehow some Soros money did make it to Adbusters between 2007 and 2009 — despite Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn’s clear statement that “he’s never given us a penny” — then that’s still a good two years away from any connection to OWS.

The article is particularly problematic from my perspective because I’m incredibly proud of Reuters’s long tradition of impartial journalism. I’m on the opinion side, not bound by such things, and if you think I’m biased you’re right. (I should mention here explicitly that this post, just like everything else on this blog, is my personal opinion. It may or may not be shared by others within the organization. But it should emphatically not be taken as representing the views of Thomson Reuters.)

Reuters news stories like the one about OWS are held to a very high standard of integrity, independence, and freedom from bias. And there’s lots in this article which tilts hard to the right.

There’s the idea that Rush Limbaugh is a good place to look if you want someone to “sum up the speculation” and provide the news hook for the entire story. The idea that the Council on Foreign Relations is a “liberal cause”. The idea that the protests were “triggered” by a campaign poster featuring a “battle-ready mob” of people “dressed in anarchist black”. The description of OWS as “the so-called occupation”. And then there’s this:

Since its obscure beginnings, the campaign has drawn global media attention in places as far-flung as Iran and China. The Times of London, however, was not alone when it called the protests “Passionate but Pointless.”

Reuters cannot — must not — get a reputation as a right-wing media outlet. We have to report the news as impartially as we can. In this case, there was no story, and nothing to report. Inventing a tenuous and intellectually-dishonest link between Soros and OWS might get us traffic from Matt Drudge — but that’s traffic which, frankly, we don’t particularly value or care for. Much more importantly, it serves to undermine the heart of what Reuters stands for. And we can never afford to do that.

Update: After a rather confusing series of events, the old version of the story is still online, while a recast version is here. Both of them now carry the headline “Soros: not a funder of Wall Street protests”. Which is an improvement.

It never even made it to its first birthday. FT Tilt, the high-priced emerging-markets blog launched with some fanfare in January, has now quietly died.

This is a sad day: Tilt was run by the FT’s two most innovative journalists, Paul Murphy and Stacy-Marie Ishmael, and was a bold attempt to view the developing world from a novel perspective. The FT could and should learn a lot from Tilt’s innovations, not least the rich and various forms of engagement it had with its readers.

The FT should also learn from Tilt’s failures, which are to be found in the business model rather than in the journalism. Tilt was a blog run by a small team of smart young journalists — but it was priced at thousands of dollars a year, and I could never understand where the value was meant to lie. Those journalists had amazing sources and language skills in countries around the world, but they were ring-fenced from the FT itself, and didn’t really contribute noticeably to the newspaper. Ironically, they might actually contribute more now, going forwards, in the wake of Tilt’s execution: FT spokeswoman Darcy Keller tells me that the newspaper is trying to find jobs for them. I hope it does; as Stacy says, they have done tremendous work, and deserve to be rewarded for it.

The model of charging very large amounts of money for information about global markets which is relatively cheap to collate just doesn’t seem to work — Tilt is now dead, and Roubini.com is up for sale. The fact is that smart, economically-literate people are never going to be that cheap — so you need to have some kind of decently-sized market for what they do. And both Tilt and Roubini.com have been priced way too high to reach even a four-digit subscriber base. What’s more, these kind of services get better as their audience grows — they learn from their audience. Keeping the audience artificially tiny by implementing a massive paywall is self-defeating.

No startup ever achieves success in less than one year, so the FT’s decision with respect to Tilt does seem hasty. What they should have done is make Tilt free to all FT subscribers, and see if it took off that way. FT Alphaville has proved that bloggy brand extensions can be extremely successful, if done right, and Tilt’s material was certainly of great interest to a very important part of the FT’s global audience.

It’s good for media companies to experiment, and it’s necessary that some of those experiments fail. But I don’t think that FT Tilt failed, in terms of its core journalistic output. I think that the FT got greedy for subscription revenues from day one, and never let Tilt grow and thrive as it could and should have done. I absolutely blame the overlords for this one, not the people who did the real work.

Update: Richard Desai-Green, Roubini’s CFO, responds:

We have 1,000 clients.

You seem to be treating info published in the media as fact but in fact the CNBC journalist had his numbers wrong.

We are cash flow positive.

We’re well capitalized.

We are continuing to hire people.

We just opened an office in India and hired 9 people.

We’re continuing to grow our business.

We can never say we won’t sell the company but I can say at this time we don’t have any offers and the executive team of our company is as committed as ever.

September was a record sales month for us and we’ve started October really well and expect our growth to continue.

The latest shenanigans at News Corp are particularly shocking because they took place at the Wall Street Journal — the flagship publication which was meant to be insulated, at least in part, from Murdoch sleaziness. But this is really bad: the WSJ Europe was telling its advertisers that it had a circulation of 75,000 — but in fact fully 31,000 of those copies were bought for as little as 1 cent apiece by companies which never saw them, and pawned them off onto random students.

And when one of those companies decided that even 1 cent per copy was too much to pay, the WSJ decided to simply buy up the papers itself, with its own money.

Oh, and the WSJ also demolished the wall between editorial and advertising, promising — and delivering — editorial coverage to the companies it was doing business with.

There was a whistleblower, too, who wound up with the sack:

European human resources executive Carol Bosack emailed the whistleblower: “You are expected to keep details and your reaction or beliefs about the recent events confidential and not shared with anyone external or internal to the business. This matter is to be kept between us, Andrew [Langhoff], Internal Audit and Corporate Legal.” No action was apparently taken at that time on the whistleblower’s allegations. The whistleblower, who had worked for Dow Jones for 9 years, was made redundant in January.

Only after the Guardian started asking questions was Langhoff finally forced to resign.

Jack Shafer makes some very good points about all this — among them, that the suspect news stories were in “special sections” which nobody reads, and that the real scandal about the WSJE’s circulation was that even padded it only managed to reach 75,000. Rupert Murdoch is probably dying to kill off this paper as he did the News of the World; it surely loses him a fortune.

But the thing which jumps out at me is that News Corp is still keeping true to its strategy of covering up anything embarrassing until Nick Davies uncovers it, at which point an executive or two is thrown under the bus. As crisis management goes, it’s a disaster — and now it’s claimed the scalp of senior Dow Jones employee number two. (The first, of course, was Les Hinton.)

As a result, the rest of the world is simply going to assume the worst — that anything rumored or imagined is probably true and has just been successfully covered up for the time being. That’s really bad for News Corp. The only silver lining is that for the time being, all of the wrongdoing has been confined to the newspaper businesses. If anything gets uncovered at Fox or Sky or HarperCollins, it’s surely all over for Rupert — the culture of corruption will have been shown to have infected the entire organization. News Corp has kept things quiet until now, in those organizations. But how long can it continue to do so?

Nick Denton lost his bet with Rex Sorgatz by the narrowest of margins — just 10 million pageviews, or alternatively just four days. But he handed over a check for $100 with a smile, and even threw us a huge party into the bargain! Hence, obvs, my not-entirely-sober status by the time we’d waited for Lockhart Steele to finish his eleven-course dinner and make his way up to the Gawker Media rooftop.

Here’s to next year — when Denton will have to achieve 700 million pageviews in order to avoid writing a second check. I promise to film the outcome, whoever the winner might be.

Ryan Chittum has taken a look at the length of the stories on the front page of the WSJ.

Here’s what’s happened to the number of stories under 1,500 words:

Here’s the stories over 1,500 words:

And here’s the stories over 2,500 words:

Ryan is dismayed at these trends. “Without going long,” he writes, “it’s hard to achieve greatness”:

Certainly, the Journal still does lots of top-flight work, and most stories don’t need 2,500 words. But many do, and how does going short as a policy help readers understand the really important stuff like systemic problems, corporate misbehavior, business innovation, or sweeping economic change?

I, on the other hand, am much more sympathetic to what Murdoch is doing here. WSJ readers are busy: they don’t have time to wade through lots of overstuffed stories in the morning. They want to know what’s going on, and why, and they want their news-delivery mechanism to be as efficient as possible.

If you look at the chart of stories over 1,500 words, it peaked at 800 per year in 2006. That’s more than 2.5 such stories per day, every day including Saturdays. And that’s just on the front page! If you look at the paper as a whole, the 1,500-word stories were appearing at a pace of six per day before Murdoch came along and brought some sense to proceedings.

I read long business and finance stories for a living — that’s my job — and I don’t read six per day, let alone six per day from a single publication. The job of the WSJ is not to overload its readers with many hours’ worth of reading every day. And the current pace, of roughly one long-form front-page story per day, seems much more reasonable to me. (Most readers, of course, won’t even read that — but at least they won’t be completely overwhelmed.)

At the same time, it’s great that the WSJ is putting lots of important information on its front page in sub-1,500-word form — on top of the “What’s News” briefs. As a news consumer, I don’t even want anything nearly that long — I’m looking to get what I need within a few hundred words at most. US newspaper stories have a lot of water weight, and nearly all of them could stand to lose a few pounds.

And what of the dramatic fall-off in the really long-form stuff, over 2,500 words? Up until 2007, those managed to make the front page roughly every other day. Then they all but disappeared, and you’ll find maybe one a month at this point.

I can easily see why that should be the case. Very long stories are often highly self-indulgent, and they take a huge amount of time, effort, and money to put together. Sometimes, they’re incredibly important, and well worth both writing and reading. Often, however, they seem to be aimed at other journalists more than at the WSJ’s core business audience — most of which simply doesn’t have the time to read such things. In a good news organization, I think, the bar should be high before any such story is inflicted on millions of blameless readers. And keeping the output of long-form stories low is one great way of doing that.

The Columbia Journalism Review is naturally going to want to encourage “greatness” in American newspapers, and for decades now “greatness” in journalism has been synonymous with Very Long Stories. But I don’t think, frankly, that the WSJ’s readers have any particular interest in getting a serving of greatness alongside their breakfast cereal in the morning. They’re much more interested in news. And that, to its credit, is what the WSJ is giving them.

Last week, Chao Deng published her “memoirs of a market reporter” at CJR.

Critics say markets reporters must suffer from A.D.D., because short-term fluctuations in stock indices really don’t matter much in the long run. They say it’s absurd to pin a single narrative on spot news involving countless individual decisions, many of them made by robots. Too often, coverage favors one slant if stocks are up and another if stocks are down when, in fact, nobody really knows.

And yet, the bigger the swing in the Dow, the more urgent the need to chase down an explanation, even if it’s a short-term one. Indeed, larger swings actually predict greater reader interest, which, in turn, validates the coverage.

She’s half right. It is absurd to tie narratives to intraday market moves. On the other hand, it’s even more absurd to chase down an explanation, especially when most of the time there is no explanation. Yes, readers demand such things. But they only harm themselves by doing so.

Here’s Chao criticizing one of her own headlines:

In response to one of my pre-market stories headlined “Futures Gain on Obama Jobs Plan,” for example, a reader had commented:

Can you prove that Obama’s $300b plan which has no chance of passage is the reason for futures being up today. There have been many days where futures rebounded after 300+ points of losses. Pretty sloppy reporting.

In retrospect, I wish the headline had been that futures were gaining “ahead” of the President’s jobs speech. Then I would have been laying out a possible reason for the gains in futures but not definitively pinning down on one. It’s a word game, sure, but words matter, and a small tweak would have resulted in a more accurate headline.

This kind of ridiculous Clintonian language-parsing helps no one, except insofar as it applies a wafer-thin layer of CYA to a practice which is fundamentally absurd. “I never said that stocks rose because of the jobs plan, I said they rose ahead of the jobs plan! So, I’m not saying that there is a causal relationship there, just that there might be! And you can’t deny that!”

Chao does try another tack, which is closer to David Gaffen’s argument in the video above:

All this might lead you to conclude that the market moves randomly most of the time, and we shouldn’t even try to find out why. But wait. Throwing our hands up is just as extreme an overreaction as pinning a day’s move on a single event. For one thing, it’s a sure way to lose readers, who are grasping for an explanation. For another thing, there are ways to do it reasonably without falling into the over-simplification trap.

Actually, faced with inexplicable moves in the stock market — and the vast majority of intraday moves are inexplicable, in that no one really has a clue why they happen, or whether there’s a reason for them at all — throwing our hands up is an entirely rational reaction, and not an overreaction at all.

There will always be readers who want some ersatz explanation of what the market did today; there will always be news organizations pandering to those readers. But if you’re a media organization which stands for reporting the truth in a high-quality manner, then market reports are a dangerous place to go, because they’re all built on quicksand.

Is it possible to do market reports “reasonably, without falling into the over-simplification trap”? I think it probably is, if you report on what the markets have been doing over the course of a few weeks or months, and you do a lot of reporting and thinking. But if you’re writing a dozen market reports a day? No. None of those are going to have real value.

Market reports should not be an everyday staple of news coverage. Sometimes, occasionally, there are stories in the markets. And then those stories can be reported. But when there aren’t any stories, there’s no point in trying to invent them. And so the daily report — let alone the intra-day report — is at heart a stupid piece of journalism. Some are better than others, to be sure. But none of them are any good.

I love the way that The New Yorker is using the iPad to construct a whole new revenue stream from its back issues.

It started* with “At the Ballpark”, an iPad-only collection of New Yorker baseball writing from 1929 to 2011, featuring the likes of John Updike, David Grann, and of course Roger Angell. That was sponsored by United Airlines.

The baseball collection was followed by a golf collection (Ogden Nash, Larry David, United Airlines again), and now by a “sustainability” collection sponsored by BMW and featuring the likes of John McPhee and Michel Specter.

Nearly all of these pieces are timeless, just waiting to be rediscovered. And the New Yorker’s archives are so deep, and are of such high quality, that there’s really no limit to how many of these things it can produce. Each one is very cheap to put out — just cobble together a bunch of articles under a theme, and get a TNY writer to pen a short introduction. Meanwhile, the advertisers get to align themselves with popular or trendy subjects (golf, “sustainability”), and reach an audience which is affluent even by New Yorker standards.

I’m in the process right now of helping to put together a printed anthology of business writing, from many different sources; such compilations can be very good, but they’re also a lot of work to put together, in terms of securing permissions and going through the laborious process of collating, printing, and distributing physical books. The New Yorker’s special iPad editions piggyback on the existing New Yorker iPad app, and are therefore very lightweight, with a marginal cost which is tiny in comparison to TNY’s printed compliations. What’s more, instead of persuading thousands of individual book buyers to shell out cash for books, the sales job on the iPad editions is much easier: you just need to persuade a single corporation to buy a single sponsorship.

TNY has experimented with selling digital compilations, too — its 9/11 e-book is $7.99. And the more different models and revenue streams, the better. But the small sponsored collections are for me the most exciting, from a business-model perspective. It’s hard to sell old content — but it’s much easier to repackage it and get a sponsor to pay you to do so.

*Update: The first of these, it turns out, wasn’t the baseball one, it was “The Digital Revolution“, sponsored by American Express. It came out on June 6.

Three years ago, NPR’s Madeleine Brand introduced a segment with Henry Blodget with these words:

Let’s go now to someone who knows a little something about financial bubbles bursting: Henry Blodget. He had a front-row seat during the dot-com boom: he was a tech stock analyst at Merrill Lynch from 1999 to 2001. Well, now Merrill is gone, sold off to Bank of America over the weekend, and Henry Blodget is gone too, banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud.

Well, if Henry Blodget was gone in 2008, he’s definitely back in 2011. And while he’s still banned from the securities industry, he’s not banned from Wall Street: in fact, he’s positively welcomed there. He rang the opening bell at the NYSE this morning, which, judging by the huge grin on his face, made him feel even better than getting a $7 million check a couple of weeks ago to expand Business Insider.

How did Blodget manage this turnaround? Well, he started a blog, Internet Outsider, which wonderfully still exists, although it hasn’t been updated in almost four years. Kevin Ryan, impressed with the blog, turned it into a fully-fledged business, called Silicon Alley Insider. And the rest, well, is history.

The move from an outsider-branded blog to an insider-branded for-profit site marked the point at which Blodget started to focus intently on creating a website which would be as addictive as possible for readers, and cause them to come back as often as possible, generating as much revenue for himself as he could muster. Giving your media business a name like Inside.com or Business Insider is one way of justifying high ad rates: the idea is to sell advertisers on the idea that your site is being written by and for high-value professionals. These names may or may not mean much to readers, but to advertisers, Business Insider is always going to be a more attractive buy than Internet Outsider.

Similarly, for all that Blodget reacted rather defensively to my post on his over-aggregation, I was mainly trying to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Putting up a vast amount of content on a daily basis is pretty much a necessary precondition for being a successful website. As is making that content as sensational as possible, with screaming all-caps headlines, striking photographs of pretty girls, or anything else which makes people click. I work in Times Square: I see for myself every day how people flock to an overstimulative environment. And creating such an environment online is the secret not only of TBI’s success, but also that of HuffPo.

For that matter, it’s the secret of CNBC, too: lots of whizzing graphics and manufactured cacophony. Both TBI and CNBC feature a huge quantity of market reports with negative added value: they’re giving a running commentary on a volatile market, making their viewers nervous and giving them an ersatz need to know what’s going on now. And the fact is that traders love this stuff — I defy you to find a trading floor which doesn’t have a TV tuned to CNBC. And truth be told, at any given point in time, some computer on that floor is going to have a TBI tab open too.

TBI is also a breath of fresh air for anybody who wants to cut through the clutter of stodgy reporting and get to the heart of the matter quickly:

“On Wall Street, I’d consistently submit a report that would say, ‘This is going to be roadkill,’ and it would come back rewritten as ‘We see some weakness,’” Blodget says. “Now I can say, ‘It’s going to be roadkill.’ That’s very satisfying.”

TBI stories are short, they’re punchy, they say what they mean, and they have a distinctive, provocative, voice. They’re not always true — but traders don’t care so much about what’s true, they care only about what people are saying and thinking right now. Media stodginess is a luxury of monopolists: the minute that media outlets start to seriously compete with each other, they always become increasingly sensationalistic. And TBI is competing not only with dozens of other news websites, but also with all the other addictive content online, including Zynga and Facebook. Henry doesn’t have the luxury of writing carefully-considered pieces and letting them stand on their own merit. His role has two parts to it, and unless he can make his carnival-barker job work, he’s going to get fired from his business-analyst gig.

Blodget’s VIP status on the floor of the NYSE today shows how far he’s come from the dot-bust days of his disgrace. Wall Street doesn’t much care about that any more — and neither does it object to TBI’s sensationalistic tendencies. Wall Street has always been a place of short memories and short attention spans. And Blodget knows just how to appeal to that audience.