Felix Salmon

Every so often, Andrew Ross Sorkin will ask me when I’m going to write something nice about him. It doesn’t happen very often, because I’m more likely to feel the need to disagree with someone on the internet than I am to feel the need to agree with them. It’s called Siwoti syndrome, and it’s endemic to the blogosphere.

And so it’s fitting that the impetus for me saying nice things about Sorkin’s baby, DealBook, is the ridiculous column from the NYT’s ombudsman public editor, Arthur Brisbane, this week. It begins thusly:

WILL readers of The New York Times in print get less because The Times must invest to compete for readers and advertisers in the digital medium?

The DealBook business news product may offer an early indication. DealBook, which was greatly expanded last fall, is a prominent presence on NYTimes.com, offering up-to-the-minute news and trivia about Wall Street deals, regulatory issues, venture capital and personalities. In print, meanwhile, it owns a half-page inside Business Day four days a week — a much lower profile than online.

This is utterly bizarre. DealBook, one of the highest-profile expansions of the NYT in recent years, is indeed a digitally-native project. It would be pretty idiotic if most of the NYT’s new sections weren’t digitally native. But as Brisbane notes, DealBook exists in print as well, taking up two full pages per week. Therefore, thanks to DealBook, readers of the NYT in print are getting more than they were before — not less.

Much more importantly, DealBook content isn’t confined to the half-page DealBook ghetto; many of DealBook’s best stories have appeared on the front page of the newspaper. When you hire reporters like Sue Craig, you run her stories big — and that’s exactly what the NYT is doing.

Different types of news work best in different formats. The Sunday magazine is better in print than it is online; DealBook is better online than it is in print. This is cause for celebration: the NYT is proving that it’s nimble enough to use whatever format works best for given content. It has dozens of blogs; I haven’t seen Brisbane complaining that they’re not available in print, or referring to their contents as “trivia.”

But Brisbane has his mind made up.

DealBook has a strangely precrash feel to it.

We can all remember what things were like before 2008: Wall Street was king, New York was the center of the financial universe, the titans of finance were gods. DealBook’s offerings remain closely aligned with that paradigm, even though the titans have lost their shine, markets have been shifting away from New York, and the postcrash world is determined far more than before by China and the broader global economy.

Despite this shift, DealBook’s reporting is about deals, hedge fund news and the doings of people on the Street.

It’s worth following Brisbane’s links, and not only because the first one goes to Reuters. His datapoints proving that Wall Street is irrelevant are (a) the fact that Lloyd Blankfein has hired a criminal defense lawyer; and (b) the megamerger between Deutsche Börse and the NYSE. Both stories, of course, have been extensively covered by DealBook; they’re right in its wheelhouse. And neither of them shows what Brisbane seems to think they show — that DealBook is an anachronistic throwback because Wall Street is less relevant than it used to be. Wall Street has always had lawyers and mergers; they’re what it’s built on.

Brisbane seems to think of Wall Street, and/or DealBook, as some kind of recondite island, insulated from bigger economic forces:

When the world economic system shuddered and stock markets dropped, I was left wondering whether The Times should have spent its money not on expanding DealBook but on enlarging its stable of journalists aimed at the wider subjects of international banks and sovereign debt.

This is just bizarre. For one thing, there’s no conceivable sense in which this is an either/or choice — Brisbane adduces no evidence whatsoever that absent extra DealBook reporters, the NYT could or would have hired more experts on the international-banks-and-sovereign-debt beat. And he ignores the screamingly obvious fact that DealBook’s new recruits know substantially more about international banks and sovereign debt than the overwhelming majority of existing NYT journalists, and therefore add to and improve the NYT’s coverage of such matters.

As Larry Ingrassia says, DealBook journalists have indeed been covering the big global and national issues in the world of finance.

Brisbane, by contrast, wants to see “in-depth investigating of a complex ecosystem” in Europe, and wants the NYT to help its readers “understand deep crises like European debt” by having journalists “step up and look at things systemically.” Brisbane reckons that DealBook is doing none of these things; that’s a matter of opinion. But he goes further than that: he says that the NYT’s investment in DealBook “meant forgoing an opportunity to strengthen reporting elsewhere.” And by “elsewhere”, Brisbane clearly means “elsewhere on the international-business-and-economics beat.”

Brisbane offers no evidence whatsoever that this might be the case. And common sense says that the opposite is true. If the NYT is pouring money into deep analysis of international finance, that’s surely an indication of resources going in the right direction, not the wrong direction. Meanwhile, if you want to point to wasted resources, DealBook stories on George Soros’s girlfriend pale in relation to the kind of things regularly called out by the @NYTOnIt Twitter stream. Is DealBook setting up email addresses dedicated to reporting the names of bodega cats? It is not. Is DealBook breathlessly reporting that Facebook makes it easy to wish your friends a happy birthday? It is not. Has DealBook uncovered the astonishing fact that women wear dresses in the summer? It hasn’t, sorry. But Brisbane points to none of these things as evidence of resources being wasted on frivolity rather than being put to good use in serious investigations of Europe’s financial woes.

More to the point, DealBook is being funded generously precisely because it represents an opportunity to bring new advertisers and new money to the NYT. Brisbane, far from disdaining the DealBook party featuring “charter advertisers like Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital,” should be celebrating the fact that “in today’s straitened circumstances” — his words, not mine — the NYT has managed to identify a deep-pocketed source of new revenues. If Brisbane wants to fund in-depth investigations of the possible global spillovers from a European collapse, then using new revenues from DealBook might be an obvious way of doing that, no?

In any event, as an assignment editor, Brisbane is pretty weak:

Just as the 2008 crisis was largely explained after the fact by The Times and other publications, the current situation feels like a replay in which we may learn only later how the tumbling dominoes were arrayed. Perhaps most important to Times readers, little is being written about the consequences that a catastrophic event in Europe could have on the United States and the world economy.

Perhaps The Times will yet jump in and expose the linkages between Europe’s institutions and the American economy and markets — before the other shoe drops.

Well, yes, Arthur, that’s the way that events in the news get explained — after they happen. You can’t explain the consequences of a catastrophic event before that catastrophic event happens, because we live in a highly complex and interconnected world which is inherently unpredictable. Was there any way of predicting, before the subprime bubble burst, what a collapse of the US housing market would do to international markets and economies? No, there was not. For instance: it caused massive losses in obscure German state-owned banks, it caused a strengthening of the dollar, and it also caused a flight out of alternative markets like Brazil. In hindsight, it’s possible to explain all of these things. But you need to see how the tumbling dominoes fell in order to be able to explain how they were arrayed.

Markets aren’t all-knowing, and they can be spectacularly wrong at times. But journalists are certainly worse at predicting the future than markets are.

Arthur Brisbane might be right about the cause of the next global crisis, but even if he is, there’s no good reason to believe that an investigative piece at this point would prove to be remotely prescient or useful for the NYT’s readership. That’s why journalists much prefer to do what they’re best at, which is reporting and analyzing the news — stuff which is happening now, or which has already happened. DealBook does that in a fast and readable and webby way, making smart tactical inroads onto a field being slowly abandoned by Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ. What’s more, DealBook — in contrast to the rest of the NYT website — is completely free.

So let’s celebrate the fact that DealBook is doing something successful and new under the auspices of the NYT. Criticisms of the form “you wrote A, but I think that B is more important and germane, so you should have written B instead” are always silly and demeaning. If Brisbane is forced to resort to that argument when criticizing DealBook, the inevitable result is that he just ends up looking particularly off-target himself.

Every so often I put a blog post up, start getting feedback on it, and realize I’ve got things horribly wrong. And then sometimes, very rarely, the opposite happens: I put up a post and discover that I was more right than I ever suspected. My post yesterday on Tim Cook’s sexuality is one of those times.

Which is not to say that it’s uncontroversial. I’ve had significant pushback on it, and on the video above, from both inside and outside Reuters. The negative responses fall into a few broad categories:

Haven’t we moved on?

This is rarely accompanied by an elucidation of exactly what it is we’re meant to have moved on from. If it’s the kind of world where people are scared to come out at work, then, first, I’m sorry, but we haven’t. There are, obviously, no reliable statistics on how many LGBT people are out at their work, partly because “out” isn’t the nice, binary concept that a lot of journalists would seem to like it to be. (More on that later.) But I can tell you that I’ve had a lot of private feedback from gay professionals thanking me for my post, saying that it’s still hard for them to come out in the workplace, and that more open discussion and open acceptance of executives’ homosexuality is something we’re only beginning to work towards.

It’s still not normal, in most workplaces, to have an open and accepting culture where all gay employees feel comfortable being open about who they are and who they love. Apple, by all accounts, is very good on that front, and Steve Jobs’s other billion-dollar startup, Pixar, is even better. But the very fact that neither Apple nor Tim Cook has ever said anything about this aspect of his identity is a clear indication that people are still worried about it. The closet is an institution designed to protect LGBT individuals from scorn and hatred; without that scorn and hatred, it would not exist. It exists. And, lest we forget, neither the federal government nor most states gives equal rights to gay couples; in most states, including California, it’s still entirely legal for a company to fire someone just for being gay.

More generally, it’s still the exception rather than the rule for successful gay people in the public eye to be out. Some gay people who achieve success feel a responsibility to serve as role models and advocate for equality and public acceptance. That’s great. But what we see very little of is the people who simply don’t hide who they are, and who don’t make a big deal of it — the non-political gays. And the reason we see so little of it is because it’s a very tricky act to pull off. Instead, we have the institution of the “glass closet”. Which is clearly just a stepping stone on the path to full acceptance. So I think it’s reasonable to say that we’re a very long way from having “moved on”.

Why should shareholders care?

The number of things that shareholders care about, with respect to any given company, is as varied as the number of shareholders itself. But certainly there’s no particular or obvious reason why Tim Cook’s homosexuality is relevant to Apple’s shareholders, qua shareholders. As journalists, however, the media has a responsibility to more than just a company’s shareholders: its responsibility lies to the public as a whole. Including millions of gay professionals, their friends, their families, and people who aspire to being gay professionals. For these people, seeing Tim Cook rise to a position of such prominence and power is something to celebrate. If the media keeps that news on the down low, we’re therefore doing a disservice to that large and important part of our readership. Meanwhile, if shareholders don’t care, that’s fine. Most news is of no interest to most people. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be published.

What business is it of mine what Tim Cook does with his genitals?

This isn’t an issue of sex, it’s an issue of sexuality — a central part of who all of us are. It’s about attraction, and identity. Not genitals.

Now admittedly Tim Cook’s sexual identity isn’t any business of yours either. But it’s worth asking who exactly we’re protecting here. Tim Cook hasn’t complained about coverage of his sexuality, but a lot of straight people who don’t know him seem to be very upset about it. It seems a bit like the old attitude of “I don’t care what consenting adults do in private, just so long as they don’t stick it in my face.”

All too often, secrecy surrounding someone’s sexuality is imposed upon that person by the straight society surrounding them. It’s the “I don’t want to hear about it” attitude which reached its nadir in the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. Many gay professionals — I’m tempted to say most gay professionals, at least outside the creative industries — act very much in line with an implicit policy of don’t-ask-don’t-tell; coming out to co-workers is done individually, on a case-by-case basis, and acts as a sign of deeper friendship and outside-of-work socialization. And it contrasts quite sharply with the overt displays of straight employees who happily plaster their cubicles with photos of their spouses and children or unselfconsciously talk about the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex.

This is irrelevant, so we should ignore it.

Not when ignoring it is the problem. As commenter Hamranhansenetc said on my original post, “what you mean by ‘ignoring Time Cook’s sexuality’ is ‘pretending he is straight.’” It’s rude to do that. And skirting the issue of Cook’s sexuality only encourages and exacerbates that problem. As Hamran continues (you should really read the whole comment, it’s great), “In the larger sense, it does not matter that Tim Cook is gay and not straight. However, it does matter when the media pretend Tim Cook is straight and not gay. And that is what we are talking about here.”

Another commenter, RaidV92C, reacted a rather different way, but just as accurately: “This is not newsworthy, it’s west coast, liberal media, hollywood forcing homosexuality as NORMAL on the general public.” Yes. Exactly. Homosexuality is normal. And people who object to stories which cover an executive’s homosexuality as being as unexceptional as another executive’s wife and children are exactly the people who are winning if no mention is made of Cook’s sexuality.

Do we report that executives are straight?

Yes, all the time, especially when we talk about their families. And more generally straight is the default option — people are assumed to be straight unless we’re told otherwise. No LGBT person likes it when they’re assumed to be straight, but it happens every day.

Isn’t this a salacious invasion of Tim Cook’s privacy?

There is nothing salacious about someone being straight, or being gay. Insofar as you think it’s salacious, that’s because you think that being gay is somehow naughty, or shameful. Is this an invasion of privacy? To a certain extent, yes. More people know more things about Tim Cook now than they did a few weeks ago. That’s what happens when you become the CEO of Apple.

In any public corporation, there’s a small number of people whose jobs are outward-facing, and at the top of the list is always the CEO. He’s the public face of the company; if you see a corporate profile on the cover of a glossy magazine, chances are it will be illustrated with a big picture of the CEO. If you don’t want your face splashed across the world’s media, then you shouldn’t be CEO of a massively valuable company which touches millions of people. Sometimes, as in the case of Mark Zuckerberg, entire movies — and not particularly accurate ones, either — are made about you and your personal life. Reporting that Tim Cook is gay is absolutely nothing, in the invasion-of-privacy stakes, compared to The Social Network. But CEOs, especially CEOs of public companies, are public figures. Their salaries are a matter of public knowledge. When you’re a public figure, you lose a certain amount of privacy. And the higher your profile rises, the more privacy you lose. Tim Cook knows that; he knows that it’s silly to expect to be the CEO of Apple without the world knowing that he’s gay. So let’s stop pretending that we’re not talking about this subject for his sake.

Finally, one critical note I got went so far as to say that “I would think people who are gay don’t care” that Cook is gay. Which is almost hilariously, completely wrong. All the feedback I’ve got indicates, unsurprisingly, that LGBT people really care about this — they care about it a lot, and they want to see it celebrated as widely as possible. It’s perfectly natural to feel pride and joy when a member of your community rises to a position of great success and prominence.

I’ve been incredibly heartened by the thanks I’ve got from gay friends, gay acquaintances, and gay people I’ve never run across before, all saying that they wish there were many more people pushing this line of argument. And I was also heartened, when I talked to John Abell about this yesterday for the video above, that he thinks the same way: not only should the media cover Cook’s sexuality in a more matter-of-fact way, but that they will, as well. Cook himself need do nothing.

At the same time, though, I agree with Nicholas Jackson that it would be great if Cook was more open about his sexuality. The glass closet is not an unpleasant place to be. The more transparent the glass, the less likely you are to have people making you uncomfortable by assuming that you’re straight. And at the same time, by never “officially” coming out, you get to avoid having to talk about your sexuality in public — something very few people like to do.

It’s sad and rather silly that gays have to make some kind of formal and official statement about these matters; certainly straights don’t. But without such a statement, as we’ve seen, the media gets cold feet talking about sexuality, and perpetuates the stigma associated with homosexuality. A very common response to my piece from journalists was to question my sourcing: how did I know that Cook is gay? Do I have first-hand knowledge? (No, and if I did, I would never have written my post.) Do I have reliable sources? (No, I’m simply passing on information which is in the public realm, just as I do with dozens of other pieces of information every day.) And isn’t it unethical to talk about something unless you know for sure that it’s true?

What’s unethical, I think, is perpetuating the false idea that Tim Cook is straight — an idea which, it turns out, many people had. One person said it was “disappointing” that I disabused her of that notion. Why she should be disappointed to learn this news I can only guess, I haven’t asked. But honest journalism has to be honest. If I allow you to continue to believe a falsehood, that’s a form of dishonesty. And I, for one, am not comfortable with that.

Tim Cook is now the most powerful gay man in the world. This is newsworthy, no? But you won’t find it reported in any legacy/mainstream outlet. And when the FT‘s Tim Bradshaw did no more than broach the subject in a single tweet, he instantly found himself fielding a barrage of responses criticizing him from so much as mentioning the subject. Similarly, when Gawker first reported Cook’s sexuality in January, MacDailyNews called their actions “petty, vindictive, and just plain sad.”

But surely this is something we can and should be celebrating, if only in the name of diversity — that a company which by some measures the largest and most important in the world is now being run by a gay man. Certainly when it comes to gay role models, Cook is great: he’s the boring systems-and-processes guy, not the flashy design guru, and as such he cuts sharply against stereotype. He’s like Barney Frank in that sense: a super-smart, powerful and non-effeminate man who shows that being gay is no obstacle to any career you might want.

One of the issues here is that most news outlets cover Cook as part of their Apple story, and Cook’s sexuality is irrelevant to his role at Apple. And so the other story — the fact that the ranks of big-company CEOs have just become significantly more diverse — is being overlooked and ignored. And that’s bad for the gay and lesbian community more broadly.

The institution of the closet is one of fear — one where people would rather be ignored than noticed, because they fear the negative repercussions of being known to be gay. It’s an institution which Cook, like any gay man born in 1960, knows at first hand. But now the risk of being ignored is bigger in the other direction: if the world can’t see gay men and women in all their true diversity, if the only homosexuals they know of are the flamboyant ones on TV, then that only serves to perpetuate stereotypes.

As the Apple story moves away from being about Steve Jobs and becomes much more about Tim Cook, we’re going to see a lot of coverage of Cook, the man. He is, after all, not just one of the most powerful gay men in the world; he’s one of the most powerful people in the world, period. The first instinct of many journalists writing about Cook will be to ignore the issue of his sexuality. It’s not germane to his job, they’re only writing about him because of the job he holds, and therefore they shouldn’t write about it.

On top of that, Cook is not exactly open about his sexuality, and Apple has never said anything about it. Cook’s formative years, professionally speaking, were the 12 years he spent at IBM between 1982 and 1994 — and at that company, in those days, coming out was contraindicated from a career-development perspective. Mike Fuller, a gay VP at IBM, told the Advocate in 2001 that he knew “IBM employees who worked for the company in the 1980s who told me they left IBM because they weren’t comfortable coming out at work”; this comes as little surprise. After all, the years that Cook spent at straight-laced IBM coincided with the height of the AIDS panic, when people were worried about sharing toilet seats with homosexuals. It would be hard to come out at any company in that kind of atmosphere.

But thankfully we’ve moved a very long way from those days. Homosexuality is no longer something shameful, to be coy or secretive about — especially not when you’ve risen to the very top of your profession. In fact, it’s incumbent upon a public-company CEO not to be in the closet.

Four years ago — a long time itself, in the history of gay rights and public acceptance thereof — John Browne resigned as CEO of BP under a shameful cloud. The reason for his downfall was not that he was gay, but rather that he was in the closet. As I explained at the time, in trying desperately to remain comfortably in the closet, he ended up lying repeatedly to the UK High Court – and that is why he had to resign.

Back then, there were no public-company CEOs on Out magazine’s gay power list; this year, Cook topped the list even before he became CEO of Apple. Keeping his sexuality a secret is no longer an option. And so the press shouldn’t treat it as though it’s something to be avoided at all costs. There’s no ethical dilemma when it comes to reporting on Cook’s sexuality: rather, the ethical dilemma comes in not reporting it, thereby perpetuating the idea that there’s some kind of stigma associated with being gay. Yes, the stigma does still exist in much of society. But it’s not the job of the press to perpetuate it. Quite the opposite.

Update: For a better and more heartfelt version of this post, read Joe Clark from back in February: “When you tell us it’s wrong to report on gay public figures,” he writes, “you are telling gays not to come out of the closet and journalists not to report the truth.”

Every so often, I get puzzled looks from FT types when I complain about their paywall, and say that it’s not only user-unfriendly for non-subscribers, it’s particularly user-unfriendly for subscribers, too.

Here’s what greeted me this morning when I followed a link to an FT story:

What happened was that the page started loading — it got as far as the headline. Then it greyed out, and the paywall box appeared. (And then — this is my favorite bit — a video flash ad started playing on top of the paywall box; it went away before I could get a screengrab.)

You can see, in the greyed out bit, that I’m logged in to the site: it says “Welcome felix” right there. Yet the paywall is asking me to login again.

When I did that, I ended up at the FT.com homepage, rather than the article I wanted to read. So I went back to the link which sent me to the FT and clicked it again. This time, I got this:

This is not much of an improvement. I’m still logged in, but now it thinks I’m a registered reader who’s used up his quota for free articles and who isn’t a subscriber. Not true! I’m a paid subscriber.

If I click on the big button saying “Click here to continue”, however, it treats me as though I have no subscription:

But if I make my way to the “Your account” link, the site still tells me that I have “Unlimited FT.com access”. Ha.

Now I have a theory for what might be going on here. This is the link I was following; if you look at the URL, it’s a bit of a mess, seems to include the address twice, and has the string “Authorised=false” in the middle. Here it is:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2f5b6c70-ccd5-11e0-88fe-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f5b6c70-ccd5-11e0-88fe-00144feabdc0.html&_i_referer=

I have no idea what might be going on here, but I seem to run into this problem quite a lot when I follow FT links which other people have shared using various social media tools. When a link to the FT escapes into the wild, it seems, the FT tends to treat it with extreme prejudice, and errs on the side of shutting it down. The FT’s OK with people sharing links using its own internal sharing tools, but good old-fashioned linking is not something it’s very cool with.

This is why I say that the FT and NYT paywalls are very different beasts. If someone’s doing the NYT a favor by linking to its stories, the NYT will welcome all those visitors. The FT, by contrast, sends them away, even if they’re FT subscribers.

The FT site works fine for subscribers who read it the old-fashioned way, starting at the homepage and then clicking around. As does the web app on the iPad. But for those of us who get our news from feeds, following links from email or Twitter or Facebook or an RSS reader, the FT paywall is a disaster. And it generates a large amount of ill will from people like me who pay hundreds of dollars a year for “unlimited access” to the site.

The death of the M&A scoop is going to happen slowly, but frankly it should happen as quickly as possible — and the past 24 hours in the history of Hewlett-Packard is an excellent indicator of why.

Yesterday, just after noon, Bloomberg found itself in possession of some market-moving news about HP: it was engaging in a major strategic shakeup, closing its WebOS division, buying UK company Autonomy for about $10 billion, and putting its PC business up for sale. (Bloomberg has since updated its story to reflect HP’s formal announcement, so I can’t link to the scoop itself.)

The markets, suffering through a massive down day, loved the news, in its leaked-to-Bloomberg form. HP shares were trading about $29.85 before the news came out; a few minutes later they were as high as $34. That’s a rise of 14%, or, to put it another way, an increase in market capitalization of some $8.5 billion.

One blogger, at least, was unimpressed. Zero Hedge, in an astonishingly prescient post entitled “Hewlett Packard Leaks Good News Early, To Mask Bad News Later,” explained exactly what was going on:

With less than 5 hours until the company’s official earnings release, Hewlett Packard just leaked to by Bloomberg that it would spin off its PC business and purchase British software developer Autonomy PLC. This is the oldest trick in the book to get a stock to drop from a higher level in the hopes that staggered releases of news, first good, then bad offsets each other, instead of having the good news be overwhelmed by the bad… We very much doubt this surge will sustain itself for more than a few minutes after the scam is understood. We also very much doubt that today’s earnings release will have anything good to say about the future.

By the end of the day, HP was back to its pre-report levels, in anticipation of a weak earnings report. But no one guessed just how weak the earnings would be.

HP was still spinning, though: its official news release was headlined “HP Confirms Discussions with Autonomy Corporation plc Regarding Possible Business Combination; Makes Other Announcements.” Among those “other announcements”:

FY11 GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be in the range of $3.59 to $3.70, down from its previous estimate of at least $4.27.

In English? “We’ve been telling shareholders to expect earnings of at least $4.27 per share this year. But actually we’re not going to come close. In fact, we’re not going to make more than $3.70, and we might make as little as $3.59.”

The drop from $4.27 to $3.59 is a whopping 16% — a huge miss, given that we’re already more than three quarters of the way through Hewlett Packard’s fiscal year. HP didn’t even attempt to guess what 2012 might hold in stock, perhaps because it’s likely to take most of that year to slough off the PC business it poured so much money into back in 2002.

And so when HP shares opened for trading today, they fell sharply — just as Zero Hedge predicted they would. They’re now trading at less than $24 per share — a 20% fall from the closing price yesterday and a whopping 31% fall from the post-leak knee-jerk exuberance levels of about 12:15pm or so yesterday.

We still live in a world, sadly, where it’s considered good journalism to get a scoop like Bloomberg’s and to move the market by publishing it — in the world of financial journalism, moving markets like this is the gold standard of what editors and proprietors are looking for. Even if you move them in what turns out to have been entirely the wrong direction, with a one-sided story which leaves out the most important news of the day.

It’s clear today that HP’s strategy is failing, that the big strategic moves are something of a hail-Mary pass, and that it’s massively overpaying for Autonomy. We got there in the end. But the M&A scoop which kicked off the news cycle looks like an attempt by HP to manage media coverage and to distract attention from its dreadful earnings guidance. And, at least for a few short minutes, it actually worked.

Matt Taibbi’s 5,000-word exposé of the SEC’s document-shredding is a magnificent piece of journalism, and is the first and last place that you should look to understand what’s going on here. After the piece came out, Senator Chuck Grassley — who’s quoted in the article — made growling noises in the general direction of the SEC, which is now very much on the back foot. But all the news and background that you need can and should be found in Taibbi’s article, rather than Grassley’s 325-word press release.

So how well is the mainstream media reporting this news? Everybody’s reporting Grassley’s statement, of course, as they should be. But the WSJ, Bloomberg, FT newspaper, and even Reuters make no mention of Taibbi or his article at all. The NYT is better, providing a link to the article and saying that the document disposal was “first reported by Rolling Stone magazine on Wednesday”, but the link feels grudging and there’s nothing which indicates that if you follow the link you’ll get a much fuller and richer version of the story than you’ll get from the NYT. Only FT Alphaville draws a direct connection between Taibbi’s article and Grassley’s statement and really encourages you to read the piece.

Blogs and Twitter, of course, are much better. Zero Hedge, Dealbreaker, Naked Capitalism, Daily Intelligencer, Clusterstock, Atlantic Wire, and many others took Taibbi’s article seriously, linked to it prominently, devoted entire posts to it, and mentioned him by name rather than just referencing the name of his publication. The Huffington Post gave the article its standard aggregation treatment, and Arianna tweeted it personally.

As for the substance of the article, Taibbi makes a very strong case. Only Matt Levine has attempted a defense of the SEC, and he says that the agency’s policy of destroying files was “publicly announced”, when in fact it was a secret internal policy which the SEC wouldn’t even admit to when asked point-blank by the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency in charge of all federal document-disposal decisions. Levine says that “the trouble with Big Brother was too much all-pervading surveillance, not too little”; the financial crisis, I think, proves him clearly wrong on that front. The SEC in particular was toothless and ineffective for the entire Bush Administration, effectively giving banks and other fraudsters a green light to do anything they wanted. And its response to these latest allegations has been distressingly defensive and obfuscatory.

I hope this turns into a big scandal and causes significant changes at the SEC — although I’m not holding my breath. But if it does, Taibbi will deserve a huge amount of the credit. And judging by today’s coverage, he won’t get it from the mainstream financial press.

Back in April of 2010, Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Village Voice, with the help of two reporter/translators, put together an excellent 4,700-word article on the complex dynamics at 55 and 61 Delancey Street, in downtown Manhattan. There was a new landlord, Madison Capital, which was better than the old landlord, but was still harassing rent-controlled tenants. There was a lot of mutual incomprehension between the mostly-Chinese old tenants and the mostly-white new tenants paying market rate. And nobody really had a full grasp of the facts.

So it’s a bit weird, 16 months later, to find the NYT’s Michael Powell put together something much less nuanced and much more one-sided on the same issue — with one of the worst abuses of the “analysts say” construction I’ve seen in a long time:

Madison Capital bought these two tenements, at 55 and 61 Delancey, in 2008 for $20 million total. (The same buildings sold for $6 million in 2003.) The tenants of the 45 apartments, predominantly Chinese and Dominican, generally pay $1,000 or so each a month. Newer arrivals, N.Y.U. students and post-college kids, pay $3,000 or so. To turn a profit, analysts say, Madison needs a minimum of $6,500 per apartment.

Which leads suspicious souls — I plead guilty — to suspect Madison’s real long-term play is to demolish the tenements and build one of those blue-glass condos where no one ever thinks of putting up a curtain.

Powell doesn’t mention that the buildings come with eight retail units, housing glamorous market-rate tenants like the Berkli Parc cafe and James Fuentes gallery. I’m no expert on retail rents on Delancey Street, but let’s be conservative and put them at $5,000 each, for a total of $40,000 a month. On top of that add $6,500 per apartment in residential rents — the “minimum” that Powell thinks Madison needs to make a profit on the buildings. The total comes to a nice round $4 million per year.

I really don’t think you need to be making $4 million a year in order to turn a profit on a $20 million investment. Let’s say that Madison took out an 80% mortgage at 5% interest: then its annual interest payments would be about $800,000. Add on a couple of hundred thousand dollars in management costs, and you’re still talking about costs in the $1 million range for the two buildings. That’s a quarter of the kind of money that Powell thinks Madison needs to turn a profit.

And frankly it’s pretty silly to think that Madison wants to tear down two perfectly good old tenements and replace them with glass condos — especially since it would be much easier and cheaper to take the existing buildings and convert them to condos over time. At a purchase price per apartment in the $400,000 range in what is now one of the most overheated property markets in America, there’s definitely potential profit there — and it’s a lot easier to sell apartments to their existing tenants than it is to try to vacate two huge buildings with 53 different tenants so that you can tear them down and build something else.

I would dearly love to know the identity of the “analysts” Powell talked to in order to get his crazy $6,500-per-apartment estimate. What’s the minimum qualification needed to be considered an “analyst” for the purposes of the NYT? On the basis of this article, simple numeracy would seem to be lacking.

Fred Wilson has nice things to say about my analysis of the NYT paywall — thanks, Fred! — but it’s worth teasing out one area where he and I might differ.

Fred says that the NYT “went with the FT’s model”, and I’ve also heard privately from another person making an impassioned case that the NYT and FT models are basically the same.

But they’re not.

The NYT paywall is so porous that it can be considered to be a genuinely freemium model. If you follow a link to the NYT site, you will never run into the paywall — no matter how many times you do so or how many NYT articles you’ve read that month. If you then want to stay on the NYT site and read other stories there, it’s very easy to do that too: the paywall might appear, but it’s easy to circumvent. (One popular way of doing this: just strip off the extra garbage in the URL which summons the paywall.)

That’s why I likened the NYT paywall to a polite “please keep off the grass” sign, with symbolic low green hoops separating would-be readers from their desired content. If they want to get there, it’s easy to do so; the NYT is just making it clear to them that it would like them to pay for a subscription first. Being both polite and reasonably wealthy, it turns out that hundreds of thousands of nytimes.com readers have done just that.

At the FT, by contrast, the paywall was much less porous from day one, and has been tightened up substantially since then. In fact, with the exception of Google’s First Click Free program, the FT has deliberately made it as hard as it possibly can for non-subscribers to read its content.

The difference between the NYT and the FT, then, is that the porousness of the paywall is a feature at the NYT and a bug at the FT. Yes, both of them have an official meter which counts how many stories you’re allowed to read before the paywall gets thrown up. That’s the crack-dealer model of selling content: give ‘em a little for free, and soon they’ll be begging for more. The free stories you read before the paywall goes up aren’t a porous paywall, they’re an integral part of the whole paywall model.

Put the question this way: when it comes to paywalls, is the FT more like the NYT, or is it more like the WSJ? The WSJ doesn’t have a meter; it has a more old-fashioned system where some articles are free to everybody and others sit behind the wall.

But I’m more interested in how forbidding the wall is, rather than in where and how exactly it’s placed. Both the FT and the WSJ are signed up for First Click Free, which means that both of them are susceptible to the elaborate workaround of copying the headline, pasting it into Google News, and then clicking through from there. Beyond that, both of them basically make it as hard as possible for non-subscribers to read stories behind the wall.

If I link to a WSJ or FT article, I can have no assurance that my readers will be able to read it. The same is true with respect to sharing that article on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or even LinkedIn. (The exception is Google Plus, since First Click Free is in effect there.) More generally, if a non-subscriber wants to read a specific story behind the WSJ or FT paywall, it’s very hard for them to do so, compared to the NYT site, where it’s much easier.

That’s why I like the NYT paywall and lump the WSJ and FT paywalls together. Whether there’s a meter or not is pretty much irrelevant, especially considering the way in which the FT has steadily tightened up its meter to the point at which non-subscribers can barely read anything at all. Even subscribers, like myself, find it very hard to read FT content a lot of the time: try following a Twitter link to an FT story on your mobile device, or trying to read an FT story in Flipboard, and you’ll see what I mean.

The NYT paywall is generous to subscribers and non-subscribers alike, and the NYT has managed to keep both goodwill and traffic with respect to its non-subscribers. That can’t be said of the WSJ and FT, who take a much more hostile and adversarial approach to the people who aren’t paying them hard cash. The NYT sees value in remaining accessible to everybody; the FT and WSJ see value in restricting access only to paid subscribers.

Which is why I think it’s fundamentally misconceived to think of the FT paywall as being very similar to the NYT paywall. Rather, it’s at heart the same as the WSJ paywall: a way of restricting content as much as possible to subscribers exclusively. The NYT is a free website with a mechanism for getting readers to subscribe; the FT and WSJ are subscription websites with some content available for free. It’s the NYT model which I love, not what’s going on at the FT.

You’ve heard it here and everywhere: Google is buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. But here’s the media twist to the story: you didn’t hear it anywhere first.

Deal scoops are the most basic currency of business journalism. Once a deal is certain to get done, but before it’s officially announced, an M&A banker on one side or the other (it’s nearly always the bankers, rather than the lawyers or the actual companies doing the deal), tactically leaks news of the deal to a carefully-chosen source.

Virtually everybody wins when this happens. The leak always takes place when markets are closed, so there’s no risk of insider trading on the news. The banker leaking the news gets to control the story, since the journalist isn’t going to call around before publishing it. And the journalist gets a big scoop.

I’ve never been particularly impressed by these scoops: if a piece of news is going to come out in a press release in a few minutes or hours, then getting it first, while markets are closed, has little value to readers. But journalists fight incredibly hard to get them, and financial journalism’s biggest names have been made this way — think Charlie Gasparino or Andrew Ross Sorkin.

But given the value being created for bankers and journalists alike by the existence of the market in scoops, it’s notable when a deal like this one comes along with no advance word at all — not even someone reporting it breathlessly on CNBC five minutes before the press release comes out.

Is there a reason for this dog not barking? It might conceivably be a function of the buyer in this case. Leaks more often come from the buy side, rather than the sell side, and there’s normally a nod and a wink from the acquirer to the banker before they happen. If Larry Page made it clear that he didn’t want such shenanigans going on around his biggest deal ever, then that would probably have sufficed to shut them down.

And then there’s the more general decline of the scoop ecosystem. No longer is it possible to control the way that a story is received by leaking it strategically for prominent placement on the front page of the WSJ or NYT or FT. All those publications will put the news online first, it will instantaneously get disseminated across hundreds of news sites, and the resulting front-page story — if it even makes the front page, seeing as how it’s now commodity news — will be reported out rather than a single-source affair.

Right now, there’s a vacancy in the scoops market: there’s generally been one go-to reporter on the M&A beat, and there isn’t one any more. Steve Lipin gave way to Sorkin, and Sorkin has now largely given up his scoopmongering for grander jobs as a book author, newspaper columnist, website editor, and TV anchor. But maybe Sorkin will be the last of the breed. Mike Arrington still gets a lot of scoops in the tech world, but the big M&A scoops from Wall Street just don’t seem as important any more, thanks largely to the speed of the internet.

Sorkin’s Dealbook was clearly set up to bring together a large number of excellent financial journalists who care about this kind of thing and who can deliver scoops — but it hasn’t done particularly well on that front. Wall Street bankers don’t care half as much as Silicon Valley dealmakers do when it comes to the most important blogs in their area — but they know that the era of the important front-page newspaper M&A scoop is largely over.

So while it’s still possible that someone new will come along and inherit the mantle that Lipin passed to Sorkin, I’m not holding my breath. And maybe that’s a good thing. Because it might free up precious journalistic resources to concentrate on real enlightenment, rather than evanescent exclusivity.

Kevin Drum doesn’t think much of Michael Lewis’s latest European dispatch for Vanity Fair — and neither do I. There’s precisely one thought-provoking paragraph in the entire 9,600-word article:

One view of the European debt crisis—the Greek street view—is that it is an elaborate attempt by the German government on behalf of its banks to get their money back without calling attention to what they are up to. The German government gives money to the European Union rescue fund so that it can give money to the Irish government so that the Irish government can give money to Irish banks so the Irish banks can repay their loans to the German banks. “They are playing billiards,” says Enderlein. “The easier way to do it would be to give German money to the German banks and let the Irish banks fail.” Why they don’t simply do this is a question worth trying to answer.

Sadly, Lewis doesn’t bother trying to answer that question. Instead, he returns to the running theme of the article, which might be evident if I excerpt a few words from here and there:

excrement – anality – Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass) – The Money Shitter – crapping – rear end – toilets – “shit” – “my little shit bag” – laxative – “Purgation-Calendar” – anal – “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!” – scatological – “I am like ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic asshole” – sitting on the john – indulgence in fecal imagery – Scheisskerl (“shithead”) – feces – one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him – filth – coprophilia – The Call of Human Nature: The Role of Scatology in Modern German Literature - bowel movements – ring of filth – shit – Scheisse – splattered by their mud – a men’s bathroom – urinate – sat in the stall – “shit” – crap – crap – “Lick my ass” – “Lick my ass” – anally obsessed – stewing in their own filth – energetic anality – a blowout with prostitutes – anality – “Kackwurst is the term for feces” – ‘shit sausage’ – Bescheissen: “Someone shit on you.” Klugscheisser: “an intelligence shitter” – “you are said to shit money: Geldscheisser” – Die Kacke ist am Dampfen: the shit is steaming – a secret fascination with filth – “Scheisse glänzt nicht, wenn man sie poliert—Shit won’t shine, even if you polish it” – “Scheissegal: it just means I don’t give a shit.” – stick figures engaged in anal sex – simulating anal sex onstage

Which is not to say that there isn’t a sub-theme here. There is:

Nazi – Hitler’s favorite words – Hitler’s doctors – Hitler – the Nazis’ ambition – provincial Nazis – Hitler – Göring’s Air Ministry – Hermann Göring – the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews – the new Holocaust Memorial – Jewish Museum – spending decades denying they had ever mistreated Jews – Nazi-era expropriation of shares in the zoo owned by Jews – Hitler’s bunker – German guilt – “the Jews” – there are no Jews in Germany, or not many – “They never see Jews” -When they think of Jews – their victims – terrible crimes – a Jew whose family was driven out of Germany in the 1930s – Aryan – A Jew’s Life in Modern Germany - HOLOCAUST – Nazis – Hitler – A landscape once scarred by trenches and barbed wire and minefields – another Holocaust Memorial

Yes, the article’s about Germany. And, like Lewis’s previous articles on European countries, it’s an attempt to shine a light on the European financial crisis through the lens of national stereotypes. This is a dangerous exercise at the best of times, but in this case Lewis has gone way over the line. His article fails to say anything new or interesting about what happened in Germany during the crisis. And that’s fine, it has a lot of company in that respect. Everybody has an off day. But this essay is worse than that: it forces us to re-examine all of Lewis’s previous articles in the series as well.

Lewis’s articles on previous countries have all been criticized within those countries for precisely the kind of stereotyping which is so pointlessly offensive in this one. Not only has Lewis descended to an extended scatological riff which demonstrates absolutely nothing about the Germans’ propensity to buy subprime-backed bonds; he’s done so while violating Godwin’s Law. (Full disclosure: I’m half-German, so not entirely impartial in this case.)

Lewis is the best writer in financial journalism by some large margin, and much of what he does when reporting and writing his stories is simply unique. His technique is a labor-intensive one: Lewis talks to an enormous number of people, works out what story he wants to tell, and then puts together various tales and individuals he’s discovered over the course of his reporting in the service of telling that story in the most entertaining and compellingly readable way. It doesn’t matter how important you are, or whether you’ve given Lewis an important nugget of unreported news: if it doesn’t help the structure of his story, he’ll happily leave it out.

There are other financial journalists who are excellent writers, albeit not very many of them. Matt Taibbi and the NYT’s David Segal spring to mind. But none of them are willing to subsume news in service of the story to the degree that Lewis is.

This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. In fact, in many ways it’s admirable. Lewis is an expository journalist by nature, and a master storyteller; he’s not a muckraker or news-breaker. We have far too few storytellers in financial journalism, while there are literally thousands of journalists looking to break incremental pieces of news. It’s clear where Lewis’s value lies — he can explain what’s going on to a broad audience of Vanity Fair readers, and doing so in a way that they love to read. No one else could make them care about Greece’s role in the European financial crisis; Lewis’s article on the country is a veritable master class on how to take a dry and recondite subject and make it thoroughly entertaining.

But Lewis’s incredible facility at storytelling is a powerful tool, and we have to be able to trust the craftsman who wields it. Lewis’s stories tend to be far more deeply reported than they seem at first glance, and in order for us to trust that he stands on the side of the angels we have to be able to trust in his judgment about what exactly the real story is. Because his raw material is extensive enough to support just about any thesis he wants.

And this is why the Germany story worries me. Not because it’s wrong, exactly. Lewis hasn’t suddenly converted to some crazy theory of the European financial crisis which fundamentally misstates what’s going on, or misleads his readers. But when he reaches so readily for the feces and fascists, Lewis does make us question his broader judgment. No honest accounting of Germany’s role in the financial crisis would — or should — include either.

I’m inclined to see the lapse of judgment in this case as being one of style rather than substance, and I continue to be a huge fan of Lewis’s journalism generally. But the lines do blur. Malcolm Gladwell has said that good non-fiction writing “succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you”, rather than on its necessarily being right convincing. The result, at least in Gladwell’s case — and, for that matter, in Taibbi’s, too — is oversimplification in the service of style. Lewis, with his Germany piece, has done something a bit different: he’s demonstrated so little faith in the ability of his subject matter to be interesting that he’s resorted to the laziest stereotypes of all. You could even say he’s the kind of person who files a polished and prestigious article for Vanity Fair, but who, on closer inspection, turns out to have filled it up with excrement.

Update: Gladwell responds in the comments, to say that while he’s OK with readers being engaged but not convinced, he’s not OK with being wrong.

When I wrote about the success of the NYT paywall last month, I got a lot of pushback in the comments and on Twitter. Here’s a sample:

“The fact people pay speaks more people’s average techno-illiteracy/laziness about how to change a link address in their browser than anything else.”

“Add ?ref=fb to the base link of any NYT article and the paywall drops, and Felix thinks this is “working”? Huh?”

“After seeing how many ways you can get by the pay “wall” I would say it isn’t working at all.”

But of course the paywall is working — with the emphasis very much on the “pay” rather than on the “wall”.

Yes, the NYT paywall is porous — but that’s a feature, not a bug. It allows anybody, anywhere, to read any NYT article they like. That makes the NYT open and inviting — and means that I continue to be very happy to link to NYT stories. (If you follow a link to the NYT from this or any other blog, you’ll never hit the paywall.)

I’m in England right now, home to both of the sights above: the polite request to “please keep off the grass”, accompanied by tiny iron hoops; and the forbidding walls surrounding the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The former encapsulates everything which people like about England; the latter is the dark and regrettable side of things.

Now imagine that both of the gardens above were open to anybody paying an annual membership fee. The gardens on the left would have many more freeloaders — people who just saunter onto the grass and enjoy the sunshine without paying. The ones on the right would be much more effective in keeping such people out.

But here’s the thing about freeloaders: if they value what they’re getting, a lot of them will end up paying anyway. What happened when the Indianapolis Museum of Art moved to a free-admission policy? Its paid membership increased by 3%. When the Minneapolis Institute of Arts did the same thing, paid membership increased by 33%.

Sales people and business-side executes tend to believe as a matter of faith that if people can get something for free, they won’t pay for it. But all they need to do is look at their own behavior to see how that isn’t true: when they go to a restaurant in a distant town that they’ll never visit again, they still leave a 20% tip. A large segment of the population feels that it’s only proper to pay for something if you’re getting value from it — and if you invite as many people as possible onto your lawn, that’s a great way of maximizing the number of people who get value from it. Especially in a world where your own enjoyment of it doesn’t impinge on anybody else’s.

The fact is that no one subscribes to the WSJ or the FT because of their exclusivity. As a result, the smart thing for both papers to do is to maximize their paying readership by maximizing their overall readership. Instead, both have taken a scared and defensive approach to digital subscriptions, fearing that if their readers can get their content for free, then they won’t pay.

Wonderfully, the NYT seems to have disproved that idea. It’s no philanthropy: it’s a publicly-listed for-profit corporation, run for the financial benefit of its shareholders. But its paywall marks a new model and very promising in getting consumers to pay for content. It’s not a completely free pay-as-you-wish approach: the NYT nudges people quite hard to pay quite a lot of money. But I’d wager that the majority of people buying digital-only subscriptions to the NYT are doing so only after bypassing the paywall at least once or twice. If you hit the paywall on a regular basis and barge past it, eventually you start feeling a bit guilty and pay up. By contrast, if you hit the FT or WSJ paywall and can’t get past it, you simply go away and feel disappointed in your experience.

Historically, when people paid for news, they paid for a newspaper — a physical object which had value to them. That model is still highly lucrative for the NYT, WSJ, and FT. But they’re taking very different approaches when it comes to the digital world. The WSJ and FT are taking a spines-out approach, on the theory that the pain of not reading their content will force people to pay. The NYT is taking a more open-door approach, on the theory that the pleasure of reading its content will be enough to persuade a large number of people to pay. It’s a far more attractive model, and one which is much more likely to attract new young subscribers over the long term.

Nick Rizzo has collated some thoughts on the NYT paywall from people in the key demographic between 25 and 30 years old, all of whom are paying for the digital-only version of the NYT. Here’s one:

I don’t want to have to deal with the dead trees. There are easily a dozen sections in the weekend edition I don’t have any interest in. It just seems wasteful.

The New York Times is my number one source for news and I appreciate the service it provides. I don’t mean to sound like a total goody-goody, and I certainly get around paywalls when necessary, but I think $15/month is a pretty good deal for the amount of enjoyment and information I get from the Times.

If they took the paywall away completely I guess I’d stop paying. I’m not really interested in skirting it, though. I also buy a lot of music, because I like the product, understand the incentives involved, and want its production to continue.

And here’s Rizzo himself:

I’m on the Times website literally all day long. Any work-around to avoid the paywall would still cost me precious minutes. Plus, I feel that maintaining a quality NYT is immensely important to the country as a whole, and I’m happy to play my part. I subscribe to the Weekender (indeed, to the slightly cheaper Sunday-only edition), which is the cheapest possible way to give myself online access. I subscribe to the New Yorker (which has a semi-paywall) and give to WNYC (which, of course, doesn’t) for similar reasons.

It’s worth noting here the way in which people often end up paying for the NYT largely in proportion to their ability to pay. Those who can’t pay, don’t. Those who can afford only the cheapest subscription buy that. Those with comfortable incomes subscribe to the seven-day paper product. It’s a great way of maximizing both audience and goodwill.

Paying for something you value, even when you don’t need to, is a mark of a civilized society. The NYT treated its readers as mature and civilized adults, and outperformed internal expectations as a result. Meanwhile, the WSJ and FT are still treating their readers with mistrust, as though they’ll be robbed somehow if they ever let their guard down a little. It’s a sad and ultimately self-defeating stance, and I hope in future they learn from the NYT’s embrace of the open web, even in conjunction with a paywall.

I’m spending this week relaxing in Sweden, taking advantage of the fact that the debt ceiling got raised to drop off the grid for a bit. So here are some things I’ve run across, in no particular order; they’re all worthy of being blogged in more detail.

First, that debt-ceiling bill. Count me in with Larry Summers on this one — it’s the worst of both worlds. Not only are its austerity measures bad for the economy, but they also fail to implement a credible long-term fiscal straitjacket. It’s almost impossible to imagine something messier than this:

Remarkably for a matter so consequential the agreement that the Supercommittee will seek to reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion comes without any agreement on what the baseline is from which the $1.5 trillion is to be subtracted. Is the $1.5 trillion from a baseline that includes or excludes the Bush tax cuts? Includes or excludes tax extenders and the annual AMT fix? These and other similar questions are unresolved at this moment.

Before the debt-ceiling debacle, we lived in a gruesome a fiscal world characterized by what you might call a permanent temporary tax system. Things like the AMT and the Bush Tax cuts were all implemented with built-in expiry dates — something almost designed to minimize the predictability of the future tax regime. It’s hard to make investments when you don’t know what future taxes are going to be, and the US has the least predictable future taxes in the world.

Now, we’ve made matters substantially worse by adding to that mix an extremely powerful and unpredictable dose of legislative mischief which is certain to come into play every time the debt ceiling is reached. No good can come of this — and no honest credit-rating agency can really have the US on triple-A when this mechanism is going to come up so frequently as a possible means by which the debt will be defaulted on.

What else?

Jeffrey Ely finds a provocative passage by Robert Parker, suggesting that the high prices of 2009 and 2010 Bordeaux might be related to market manipulation by the French. Yes, there’s strong demand from China — but no one really knows how much demand there is, and the chateaux are being extremely quiet about how much of their production they’ve actually sold at the current stratospheric levels. Says Parker:

If much of the 2009s, as well as the 2010s, are not sold through to wine consumers, who are the true marketplace since they actually drink these wines, and then tend to replenish their stock, buttressing the marketplace, then this is a bubble. Despite huge warehouses filled with reserve stocks of great vintages, prices could be set for a major adjustment, just as we have seen in the United States with the real estate market.

Of course, the thing about wine futures is that you can go long, by buying them, but there’s no way of going short. So don’t expect this bubble to burst any time soon, even if it does exist.

Then there’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, who found that one of the chief legal architects of the notorious Abacus deal is now co-chief counsel at the SEC. TED sees no problem here, but I do — while it’s entirely possible that Adam Glass is now on the side of the angels and doing his utmost to close the kind of loopholes that he used to take advantage of, he’s not saying anything and neither is the SEC, which makes it seem that they’ve got something to hide. More transparency, please! If poachers are going to become gamekeepers, they should come out into the sunlight and publicly renounce what they used to do.

I also like this short paper arguing that there comes a point at which more lending and a bigger financial sector is bad for growth, contra the arguments of bankers who always say that restrictions on their activities will hurt the broader the economy.

And Ken Rogoff is fed up with the “Great Recession” meme, saying it obscures the crucial point that we just experienced a financial crisis, and makes it seem that instead it was a large and natural cyclical phenomenon.

Finally, it’s worth revisiting this 2008 column from Charlie Gasparino. In it, he said that stock prices (the Dow was at 8,176, the S&P 500 was at 845) were depressed because markets were rightly convinced Barack Obama was going to raise taxes.

Since then, of course, there have been no tax hikes, but stocks are up about 50%, meaning anybody who bought into Gasparino’s pessimism has lost a lot of money.

I’m only saying this because Gasparino has taken to Twitter to declare that the column was right, that it somehow predicted the 1.3% GDP figure for the second quarter of 2011, and that I was a moron for criticizing the column at the time. It’s also worth noting that since the column was published, Gasparino has moved from CNBC to Fox. That’s all. I report, you decide.

Earlier today, there was a flurry of activity in the media subcircle of Twitter, based on a tweet from a fake Twitter account saying that Piers Morgan had been suspended from his CNN show. It wasn’t true, as CNN rapidly said, and as Morgan himself confirmed. But various important media people, including most prominently Channel 4 News’s Jon Snow, tweeted the “news” and made it go briefly viral.

Here at Reuters, our official news accounts didn’t touch the story. Our social media editor, Antony De Rosa, did, and then put out a long series of tweets — and even a Tumblr entry — saying that he’d acted too hastily and should have said that the news was unverified. As for me, I retweeted Anna Holmes wondering whether the news was real, and then, literally seconds later, retweeted Brian Stelter saying that no, it wasn’t. Very shortly thereafter, I retweeted Reuters’s Jim Impoco, who made the very good point that “The good news is how quickly that faux Morgan tweet got stomped on.” That’s a point which was also made by De Rosa, who noted that “Twitter is faster than anything at knocking down rumors, faster than TV, web, and obviously print”.

The meta-conversation about how Twitter got it wrong soon became much louder than the original conversation was — and there was a strong thread within it of people, De Rosa included, apologizing for getting it wrong and tweeting inaccurate information. In response, I put up a quick Tumblr post. Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper: it’s where you see news take shape. Rumors appear and die; stories come into focus; people talk about what’s true and what’s false.

There are flagship Twitter accounts, of course, like @Reuters, which have a lot of equity in being right, and where it’s highly embarrassing to be wrong. But the point about social media is that it’s social — as a general rule, it’s people talking to each other, as opposed to declaiming the Truth in a broadcasty manner. I’m happy to be wrong on my blog — one of my personal slogans is that “if you’re never wrong, you’re never interesting” — but I’m even happier to be wrong on Twitter, which is a forum where things disappear quickly and the stream is infinitely more valuable than any individual tweet. I consider my tweets in general and my retweets in particular to be a contribution to the stream; I’m not placing my personal or institutional reputation behind their accuracy.

A few months ago I had a fascinating conversation with Matt Winkler, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News. He’s not averse to Bloomberg journalists being on Twitter, and some, like Lizzie O’Leary, have fantastic accounts with large followings. In her little Twitter bio, she writes that “RTs are not endorsements, dummy” — but that’s not the way that Winkler sees it: his basic point of view is that before a Bloomberg journalist retweets something, she should basically re-report the the entire story. And in the reaction to my Tumblr entry, non-Bloomberg people like Steven Springer seem to think much the same thing.

I don’t have the time, the ability, or the inclination to re-report everything I retweet — and neither does any other journalist with a decent Twitter following. (What’s more, taking everything at face value would remove all the fun from parlor games like trying to work out who’s doing hate retweets, and when.) I do think that it’s probably not a good idea for people like Jon Snow and Antony De Rosa, who are representatives of news organizations and who have large followings on Twitter, to tweet out news without any indication of where it is coming from. If Snow had simply retweeted the @danwooden tweet, or if De Rosa had simply retweeted Snow, then it would have been clear where the information was coming from. Without the retweet, or any link to follow, it looks as though it’s first-hand reporting — and no journalist ever wants their first-hand reporting to be in error.

The high-church media ethicists, however, are having none of this. Dean Starkman, responding to my metaphor that Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper, says that the size of one’s social graph matters:

Twitter’s not a like newsroom because those have four walls, while Twitter’s amplification power is potentially very large. Your “newsroom” has 25,000, sorry, *30,000*, people in it. It’s a lot closer to publishing than being in a closed news meeting.

And Chris O’Shea goes further still:

While some people who tweeted the rumor – such as Anthony De Rosa – went the right route and simply apologized for the error, Salmon took to his blog and basically said it’s okay for journalists to tweet false information…

People obviously make mistakes, but to tweet something wrong and then say, “Oh, well it’s fine” when people follow you because you’re supposed to be a credible news source, is wrong.

If Salmon doesn’t want that responsibility placed on his account, he should remove “Felix Salmon is the finance blogger at Reuters” from his Twitter bio. Until then people are going to give more weight to what he tweets, whether he likes it or not.

Now there’s very little in the way of clear blue water between De Rosa and myself on this issue. We both believe in transparency, and quickly correcting any mistakes you’ve made as soon as you realize you’ve made them, in a public and traceable manner. If I’d simply reported the Morgan rumor as fact, without any kind of sourcing through a link or a retweet, then I too would have apologized. So it’s weird that O’Shea makes such a big distinction between the two of us.

I certainly don’t think that making a mistake and then correcting it is significantly worse than making a mistake, correcting it, and then apologizing for making the mistake. The last step, the apology, is supererogatory — it has to be, lest it be meaningless.

And more generally, one of the great things about Twitter is its immediacy, the way in which people are talking to each other without carefully thinking first about whether or not everything they’re saying holds up to the standards of some grand and noble news organization. That’s something valuable, and it would be a shame if a small group of self-appointed media-ethics priests tried to crack down on it.

Is my Twitter account really “supposed to be a credible news source”? For that matter, is my blog supposed to be a credible news source? I treat neither of them that way. I rarely break news; I’m much more interested in linking to other people who do that much better than I do. People can give my tweets — and my blog, for that matter — as much or as little weight as they like; I have no control over that.

But for the record, and to state the obvious: my blog and my Twitter account are places where I state my personal opinions. There’s a spectrum here; the blog is probably the least personal, then the Tumblr, then the Twitter, all the way to my Foursquare feed, which is accessible only to genuine personal friends. Social media makes obvious what has always been the case: that journalists are fallible humans with opinions. This should be shocking to no one. And that’s something to celebrate, not something to apologize for.

Back in April, I was very skeptical that the NYT would achieve its leaked goal of getting 300,000 paying digital subscribers, and I put my money where my mouth was, entering into a bet with John Gapper. John wouldn’t bet me that the NYT would get to 300,000 within a year, so we pushed it out to two years instead. But he needn’t have worried, as Seth Mnookin explains:

It will take years for the ultimate wisdom of the Times’ strategy to be apparent, but the company’s second-quarter-earnings report proves that its digital-subscription plan has thus far been an enormous success. The internal projections have been closely held, but several people have confirmed that the goal was to amass 300,000 online subscribers within a year of launch. On Thursday, the company announced that after just four months, 224,000 users were paying for access to the paper’s website. Combined with the 57,000 Kindle and Nook readers who were paying for subscriptions and the roughly 100,000 users whose digital access was sponsored by Ford’s Lincoln division, that meant the paper had monetized close to 400,000 online users. (Another 756,000 print subscribers have registered their accounts on the Times’ website.)

There seems little doubt that, barring something enormous and unexpected, I’m going to lose my bet; the only question is by how much. Total digital subscription revenues are still going to be a drop in the bucket — if the NYT gets 500,000 digital subscribers at say $200 a year each, that’s $100 million a year, which is a lot of money in absolute terms but still just a fraction of the more than $2 billion that the NYT sees in total annual revenues. Digital advertising revenues alone are running at about $700 $350 million a year. The subscription revenue is nice, but it’s not in and of itself going to allow the Sulzbergers to start paying themselves a dividend again.

Those paying digital subscribers, however, are much more valuable than their subscription streams alone would suggest. They’re hugely loyal, they read loads of stories, they’re well-heeled, and advertisers will pay a premium to reach them. Judging by the second-quarter results, which is admittedly early days, it seems as though total digital ad revenues are going up, not down, as subscriptions get introduced: the holy grail of paywalls.

Mnookin concludes:

As a profession, journalism of the kind the Times practices can be dangerous. And as a business, in a metaphorical sense, more so. You’re depending for your living on the seriousness and high purpose of a substantial segment of the American public. In that sense, the Sulzbergers have always been involved in a fool’s game. The current Sulzberger’s bets have at times seemed the most outlandish, as if he’s willfully refused to read the writing on the wall. But for the Sulzbergers, whatever their faults, even when the paper was making money, it has always been a calling rather than a business. Insisting that people would pay for their content when a consensus of media savants said that they would hemorrhage readership was the work of an eccentric family. Which the Sulzbergers are and always have been. And for now, cross your fingers, it seems to be working.

My fingers are crossed: I was very much a skeptic with regard to the paywall experiment, but I’m extremely happy that it’s working, I’m a big fan of the NYT, and I sincerely hope it has found a predictable and dependable new revenue stream in the volatile and treacherous media business.

I’m particularly glad that the NYT has proven that a very porous paywall can work — one in which just about anybody online can read just about any NYT article for free very easily. The media business has never been about denying access to people who want to read your publication, but the paywalls at News Corp, as well as the one at the FT, are based around that model. The NYT, by contrast, has proven that people will pay even if the paywall is extremely porous.

And in today’s fractured online media environment, the tougher your paywall, the more annoying it is. The NYT paywall is done pretty well, and I still find myself being asked for a username and password on a distressingly regular basis when I’m reading it on the iPad, often when articles come up in an app like Twitter or Flipboard, and I try to use the embedded sharing tools. More distressingly still, entering the password doesn’t always work.

But compared to the FT, the NYT paywall is a dream: not only do I run into the paywall pretty much every time I try to read an FT article on my iPad, I even run into it pretty regularly when I’m on my desktop computer. I’m a paying subscriber, but a very unhappy one: repeatedly typing in a username and password on a touch-screen device is decidedly unpleasant. Overall the user experience at the FT in general seems to be taken straight from the TSA: the general principle seems to be that no amount of customer inconvenience is too much if it makes sure that no unauthorized person will ever be allowed through.

Oh, and one other thing: when I signed up I selected the $4.99 per week option, and the FT helpfully told me that over the course of a year, the total annual payment charged to my credit card would be $259.48. What they didn’t tell me was that I’d have to pay that all at once — and then some: they actually charged me $282.52, after slapping on 8.9% sales tax. (The NYT, by contrast, doesn’t do that: if they do charge sales tax, they don’t break it out, and instead bundle it into the total subscription charge.)

I’ve been getting the physical NYT delivered to my home for well over a decade, which means I pay a lot more for the NYT than for the FT. But I don’t do it in one huge annual chunk, and I don’t feel like I’ve been tricked when I see my credit card bill. As a result, I don’t begrudge the NYT the money I pay them, but I feel much less well-disposed towards the user-hostile FT. And I frankly don’t read the FT all that much, either. I get my news socially, and people simply don’t share FT stories in the way that they do with the NYT. The FT annoys its readers into taking out a subscription; the NYT, by contrast, has persuaded hundreds of thousands of people — it’s overtaken the FT already — to pay for digital-only subscriptions even when they don’t really need to. That’s a much more positive model.

Update: The sales tax question might have been answered! Ryan Chittum points me to the New York State sales tax rules:

If you sell publications that qualify as newspapers or periodicals for sales tax purposes, you don’t need to charge sales tax because they’re exempt. The exemption also applies to charges for electronic versions of newspapers or periodicals if you sell a hard-copy version, and both versions contain the exact same information (except for advertising).

The question here is what is meant by the phrase “if you sell a hard-copy version”. Clearly my subscription to the NYT is exempt from sales tax, because I’m subscribing to the paper version. But what about my digital-only subscription to the FT? The FT does sell a hard-copy version which contains the exact same information — but it just isn’t selling that hard-copy version to me. Is that why they feel they have to charge sales tax?

After taking phone calls about Rupert Murdoch on Brian Lehrer’s show this morning and then immediately doing an hour-long diavlog with Alex Massie on the subject, I’m beginning to get a little Murdoch-ed out. But there are three newish points that are worth raising.

Firstly, what was the mechanism by which it was agreed that Rupert and James Murdoch would appear in parliament together? Having James by his side was a godsend for Rupert, and James clearly took his role as a shield for his father very seriously. I’m sure the more aggressive MPs would have preferred to be able to grill Rupert on his own, as they did Rebekah Brooks. How did that not happen?

Secondly, according to Michael Tomasky, there is a strong case that News Corp really could be prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the US, were the Justice Department so inclined.

And thirdly, just check out the number of Murdoch defenses on the WSJ op-ed page over the past couple of days:

• The original, notorious, anonymous op-ed;
• A paean to Murdoch by Robert Pollock, the WSJ’s editorial features editor;
• Bret Stephens arguing that the News of the World was less bad than the Guardian and the New York Times;
• An argument by two former Justice employees that News Corp should not be prosecuted under the FCPA;
• Holman Jenkins saying that phone-tapping was “tolerated, routine and abetted by official agencies”;
• James Taranto attacking Joe Nocera’s complaints about the WSJ; and
• James Taranto, again, the following day, attacking other Murdoch’s attackers, and clamoring for press freedom.

I’m sure that there will be many more to come. But I’m sure this is far from what the Bancrofts expected when Murdoch promised them that the WSJ would enjoy total editorial independence.

Update: Here’s Bloomberg’s Max Abelson on those WSJ defenses of News Corp; he not only did it better than me, he also did it faster.