Media and technology executives are meeting Wednesday and Thursday in New York City at a conference hosted by private equity firm Quadrangle. Note the word private.

When they meet at the Plaza, they will talk about a ton of different things that their customers, their investors and other readers want to know. I have to apologize for them because they’re not letting in any riff-raff. And that includes reporters who get paid to spend all day figuring out how these people decide what kind of entertainment you want, what kind of technology you pay them for and what deals they pursue with the money that you give them when you buy their stock. This event always excludes press, but that’s no reason not to highlight what you probably are missing because of this. After all, who wants to wait for the 8-K filing?

Some press will be allowed, but it will be an assortment of celebrity journalists who will moderate panels and, according to Peter Kafka, author of “MediaMemo” at News Corp’s AllThingsD blog, will not write about the event (I’m talking about Maria Bartiromo and David Faber of CNBC, The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, etc).

Peter wrote two posts about this, here and here. He also issued me a challenge to sneak into the conference, but horror of horrors, I’m on a deadline that I can’t shirk any longer. So consider this an invitation from me to you to go to the Plaza and catch these guys on the way in and out of the building. It’s a fun way to spend the day, and maybe you’ll learn something interesting.

Here is the agenda, courtesy of Peter Kafka. Below that is a list of speakers. Outrage breeds corrections: I have to amend the record: The list I had posted here of topics is last year’s agenda. My mistake. The list of speakers appearing THIS year still appears below.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

(Photo of Barry Diller, who will remain away from prying eyes at Quadrangle’s confab: Reuters)

After seeing Martha Stewart on CNBC this morning, I was surprised to find that she doesn’t sell a Martha Stewart-branded KA-Bar knife because she seems like she knows how to use one.

Stewart appeared on TV to talk about the company’s new merchandising agreement with Home Depot. The hardware big-box retailer will offer a line of products sold under the Martha Stewart brand. Before they got too far into the interview, they talked about a similar program with discount retailer Kmart that ends in January 2010 — the same time that the Home Depot deal begins.

Here is an excerpt:

The new [Kmart] ownership really has let our line deteriorate. It’s been kind of ripped off, I would say, and really diminished, and the quality is really not what I am proud of. Have you been into a Kmart lately? it’s not the nicest place to shop. …

The stores are not what they were. The shopping experience is not what it was. The products are not there that people go in for. And it’s not a good situation. And as a designer-supplier, I have been extremely disappointed.

CNBC reporter Becky Quick didn’t hide her agreement:

I’ve been in a Kmart recently too and I know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s not only that the quality of the stores has dropped, it’s that it’s hard to find sales people to help you in some of these stores.

And it went on like that for a while. Are you listening, Home Depot and Macy’s? Make sure you keep making good things.

(Photo: Reuters)

 Perhaps he woke up one day and smelled his own coffee shops struggling in the weak economy. So, Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Howard Schultz is waking up to a fresh brew by percolating new business in the media world.

Starbucks has become the official naming sponsor of CNBC's "Morning Joe" television show. The move is a throwback to the 1950s, when television programs were underwritten by manufacturers ranging from soap to cigarettes, and it comes as traditional advertising dollars are shrinking for publishers, television networks and other ad-reliant businesses. 

Schultz, who has made his own headlines over the years, also is an investor in TheWrap.com, a celebrity news blog based in Los Angeles, through Maveron, a venture capital firm he co-founded with Dan Levitan.

Maveron's other investments include restaurant operators Pinkberry and Potbelly Sandwich Works as well as online names like eBay and drugstore.com.

(Photo: Reuters/Robert Sorbo)

It seemed only a bit odd that media star Arianna Huffington was the guest host on CNBC the day the all-important stress test results were due. Not to play down her credentials in media or commentary circles, but where were the celebrated bank analysts, the corporate chieftains and the investment gurus who so routinely enjoy a dose of the limelight on America's Business Channel?

Wasn't this the perfect day for a newsmaker rather than a news talker? The Huffington Post founder has been a good reality check on market cheerleaders who live on CNBC, but on Stress-Test Thursday, the less-than-casual viewer expects insiders with insight. It tasted like something strange and exotic had made its way into the DealZone coffee machine.

Then disgraced former New York Governor and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer joined the fray, and the slightly odd became surreal. Spitzer, who casually noted he was invited to the show (hint, hint), gave a spirited view from the nosebleed seats, far back from the federal policymakers' bench.

Forget all this stress test stuff -- what about Spitzer's attempt at resurrection? Anchor Joe Kernen asked whether Spitzer the AG would have prosecuted Spitzer the governor and Spitzer the guest legal expert answered no, arguing that issues of judgment are more important than issues of law.

This should be equally true for the banks, Spitzer said. But the banks' transgressions were far more damaging to many more people than Spitzer's own. It's hard to believe moral suasion and limiting access to cheap funds would have been enough to persuade greedy bankers to act more responsibly. Certainly, shareholders would not have rewarded them for behaving better while others were making a killing selling toxic investments.

DealZone commends CNBC's producers and guest bookers for creative thinking. While the stress test results are not due until late this afternoon, so much has been leaked already that the minutiae still to come will probably numb the minds of even the hardiest financial news junkies. With no news to break, the Huffington/Spitzer show turned out to be refreshingly watchable. Indeed, who understands a stress test better than Eliot Spitzer?

Deals of the Day:

* Anheuser-Busch InBev said it agreed to sell its South Korean Oriental Brewery to private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co for $1.8 billion, allowing the world's largest brewer to repay debt.

* Global miner Rio Tinto Ltd/Plc has not talked to Chinese state-owned metals firm Chinalco about revising a planned $19.5 billion tie-up, and still believes the deal makes sense.

* Australian blood-products and vaccines maker CSL said U.S. competition regulators had yet to make a decision on its proposed $3.1 billion takeover of smaller rival Talecris Biotherapeutics Holdings Corp.

* Australian brewer Lion Nathan, which has agreed to a $2.5 billion takeover by Japanese brewer Kirin, halted trade in its shares on Thursday on concerns the confidentiality of its talks with Kirin may have been breached.

* U.S. coal miner Peabody Energy and Anglo-Swiss miner Xstrata plan to bid for a majority stake in Indonesian coal miner PT Berau Coal in a deal that may be valued at around $1 billion, two sources with direct knowledge of the deal said.

* Porsche Automobil Holding SE stock fell as much as 17 percent after the sports car maker scrapped attempts to take over Volkswagen and agreed to explore a merger with Europe's biggest carmaker.

* Magna International has so far presented a more concrete proposal on General Motors unit Opel to the German carmaker than Fiat, Opel's supervisory board member Armin Schild told Reuters.

(PHOTO: New York Governor Eliot Spitzer stands next to his wife Silda Wall Spitzer as he announces his resignation at his office in New York March 12, 2008. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid)

Rick Santelli’s extended tryout process to join the more vitriolic commentary-mongers at Fox News continues. Santelli already raised eyebrows and network blood pressure at CNBC when he aired his “tea party” comments on live TV, raising questions among media obsessives about whether he was in the tank for the Republican Party.

Today’s incident was tamer in the sense that he only accused one of his colleagues, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman, of asking stupid questions. That’s not as big an insult to a civilian as it is to a journalist, who hopes to get paid for asking smart questions. (And someone with Liesman’s extensive business journalism pedigree probably asks fewer stupid questions than most.)

The background: Six of the CNBC gang were on TV discussing whether Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and ex-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pressured Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis to keep quiet about losses at Merrill Lynch when Bank of America was also under pressure from the government to buy Merrill. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said last month that Bernanke and Paulson threatened Lewis with losing his job if he didn’t push the acquisition through to, essentially, save the U.S. and world financial systems.

One CNBC reporter, Dennis Kneale, wondered aloud if it would be illegal for, say, a lawyer to recommend to Lewis that he violate “Reg FD” disclosure laws that would more or less deceive Bank of America’s shareholders into accepting the deal, knowing that if they were aware of Merrill’s troubled condition, they would oppose it with their very lives.

Then this happened (Beware: Everyone was speaking over everyone else, so we might have missed a word or two here and there):

Liesman: Ask the question in a more compelling way: ‘I want you to save the world and not disclose.’

Santelli: Come on, Steve! Are we going to come up with excuses to break the rules? To break the law? You sound like Richard Nixon! Who did you vote for, Steve?

Liesman: All I was posing was the ethical issue here. If it helps out to stabilize the system, is there a compelling reason to not disclose? I am not advocating that.

Santelli: You don’t break rules in a crisis condition!

Liesman: If you want to blow a gasket on that, Rick, well then, blow it on somebody else — not me!

Santelli: Well, then don’t open your mouth and say dumb things!

CNBC: We insult our own reporters so you don’t have to.

(Photo of fighting — and very showy — lorikeets: Reuters)

The opening panel at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual meet in Denver addressed an interesting question: Did 9,000 business journalists blow it when it came to ringing the alarm bells on the financial meltdown?

The five SABEW panelists — The New York Times’ business editor Larry Ingrassia, Columbia Journalism Review critic and former Wall Street Journal reporter Dean Starkman, personal finance columnist Jane Bryant Quinn, Emmy-winning former ABC News investigative reporter Allan Dodds Frank and Greg Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan — agreed that the financial press could have done more. Newspapers, wire services, magazines and television stations could have been more aggressive, and they could have taken more pains to explain why complex things like mortgage-backed securities might matter to the average reader.

But journalists can hardly be accused of “blowing it” when even doomsday pundits like Bob Shiller and Nouriel Roubini could predict only parts of the nightmare scenario that is unfolding in the U.S. economy right now, the panelists said.

CJR’s Starkman, who’s just completed a “deep dive” into the news coverage leading up to the financial crisis, said his report, which will be up for public consumption next month, found that the top journalism outlets didn’t do a good enough job of signalling that the tiny sparks in the housing and securities markets could flame up into a giant financial blaze.

“If the question is, did the business press provide adequate warnings to the public about the crisis, the answer is negative,” Starkman said. His 6,400-word report, which surveyed scores of articles in publications like the NYT, WSJ, Forbes, Fortune and others between January 2000 and June 2007, concludes that the investigative reporting started out strong but then downshifted to “good, but not sufficient,” as reporters wrote about the housing bubble and defective mortgage products, but failed to focus on the lenders.

The Times’ Ingrassia took issue with Starkman’s as-yet-unreleased report, rattling off a long list of stories his paper had done in the early years about ”predatory home equity loans (that) were being diced into mortgage-backed securities,” out-of-control mortgage markets and even excess executive pay. “I think the record shows that the press was there in laying the groundwork and ringing the alarm bell.” But, Ingrassia added, there was little more reporters could do if regulators didn’t heed the news and readers didn’t “seem receptive” to it.

Would politicians have done something to avert the crisis if people had cared more and pressed their legislators for better regulation? Which begs a further question — did reporters fail to write stories in a way that would make people sit up and take notice?

Maybe journalists couldn’t do more than they did. “The job of the press is most effective when it stirs people up so they can exert political pressure,” said Greg Miller, who teaches at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. But financial journalism has become much tougher to do in recent years, he added.

“There are no longer just investment bankers doing everything today,” Miller said. “Everyone’s a specialist. No one banker could explain the entire process of how securitization worked. So it’s asking an awful lot of journalists to break it down and explain when bankers don’t know.”

And if journalists do begin to understand how it all works, Miller said a further challenge is: “How do we make this simple enough for people who don’t spend their lives in this to understand?”

The panelists — and moderator Paul Steiger, a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal who now runs the investigative journalism outfit ProPublica –all agreed that understanding the nuts and bolts of the housing and securities markets and how it all led to the meltdown is a tough call for reporters. But they did take journalists to task for not being enough of the curious skeptics they are supposed to be.

Dodds Frank blamed a “culture of reverence” that has crept up in financial journalism, especially in television outlets like CNBC, for contributing to a dearth of early-warning signals. “What has happened in broadcast journalism… where business is now glamorous but real analysis is switched out for the big-get CEO interview.” Softballing replaced hard-hitting questions, he added.

Journalists also drank the Kool Aid when it came to an unquestioning acceptance of deregulation and free markets that would self-correct as the right way forward for capitalism, said Jane Bryant Quinn. “It became very unfashionable to say we ought to regulate,” said Bryant Quinn, who writes columns for Bloomberg.com and Newsweek. “We drank the Kool Aid, saying free markets are the best, (but) we should have paid enough attention to where the regulatory authorities could fail.”

In the end, a member of the audience reframed the original question in the context of the journalism industry, giving it a darker pall: Did the press not do enough to get the public interested, and therefore the regulators to do nothing, and what does that say about the relevance of the journalistic enterprise? Quite a question to mull over as newspapers and other media struggle to find reasons to justify their existence.

Keep an eye on:

• Verizon and Apple are discussing the possible development of an iPhone for Verizon, with the goal of introducing it next year, people familiar with the situation tell USA Today (USA Today)

• The upfront haul for ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox will decrease 15 pct from the 2008 tally to about $7.7 billion, according to a projection by Barclays Capital (The Hollywood Reporter)

• The fast-shrinking newspaper business set a new standard for job insecurity in the last couple of weeks (NY Times)

(Photos: Reuters)

Slightly down is the new up.

At least judging from the reception that advertising giant WPP received today after it predicted like-for-like revenue would drop 2 percent this year.

Shares were up about 5 percent after the report from WPP, the last of the big three advertising holdings to post quarterly results. For all the worry about the advertising recession — and no doubt advertising is bad right now — WPP, Omnicom and Interpublic also showed some bright spots in their numbers.

WPP, in fact, said the in the ”long-term” the outlook for the advertising and marketing services business “appears favorable.” “Long-term” isn’t a particularly well-defined timeframe, but nonetheless those are pretty upbeat comments coming from an industry that has seen auto, retail and financial services spending drop like a stone.

“The fact they’re saying revenues in 2009 will be down 2% is relatively reassuring given the current climate,” RBS analyst Justin Diddams told the Wall Street Journal.

Keep an eye on:

• ABC is hoping the financial crisis makes for some good laughs, as it readies two Wall Street comedy pilots ( AdAge.com)
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper is pressing ahead with plans to turn into an online-only publication (WSJ.com)
• CNBC takes it on the chin — yet again (Gawker)

(Reuters photo of CEO Martin Sorrell)

Can you tell it’s book-flacking time?

Vanity Fair is running the second excerpt from the forthcoming book that Michael Wolff wrote about News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch (this one centers on his family), and Wolff is making the rounds this week to talk about it. He was on CNBC moments ago, engaging in everyone’s favorite media parlor game: Parsing Murdoch’s every move like a multi-clause sentence. Friday’s appearance follows a panel discussion at a PaidContent.org conference earlier this week where he made similar remarks. Here’s what he said on CNBC.

What will Murdoch do after buying The Wall Street Journal? What’s his next move?

“I’m not sure that he exactly knows. One of the problems here is that he bought a newspaper and not only did he buy a newspaper, but if he had only waited six months to buy that newspaper he would have saved a billion and a half dollars.” (Nothing like hindsight, is there?)

What will he buy? What will he sell?

“I don’t think that he’ll do either in the short term. I think in the short term they’ll try to manage their businesses the best way they know how.”

Does Rupert care that his stock is down?

“Does he care? No! Do the people around him care? The people holding stock options? Well, let me put it this way. Having spent a lot of time around that building, I have heard people at the highest echelons of that company complaining deeply about the price of News Corp shares.”

Was buying the Journal a mistake?

“I don’t think it’s a mistake for Rupert. I think it’s actually the crowning glory for Rupert. Is it a business mistake? Of course it’s a business mistake. It’s a newspaper!”

Who will run News Corp after Murdoch dies?

“I think we know who it’s going to be. His four adult children are going to be very clearly holding the reins.
James will be the CEO. … It depends on when Rupert departs this vale of tears. Is james ready to be the CEO? … Rupert wants all his children as close to him as they can possibly be but there’s no question at this point that the heir apparent is James.”

Would News Corp buy CBS? Its stock is falling like a rock.

“Somebody is going to buy CBS. Is it going to be News Corp? My bet would probably be Time Warner as the buyer for CBS.”

(Photo: Reuters)

If you didn’t know better, you’d think CNBC was running for office and Fox Business was the down-in-the-polls attack dog. 

That’s the feeling you get watching Fox Business’s latest TV ad, which throws CNBC star and stock picker Jim Cramer under the bus and urges viewers to, you know, kick CNBC to the curb.

Truth is, Fox sort of IS behind in the “polls” — its rating are still a fraction of CNBC’s, even though the global financial crisis has been on the front page for weeks. The New York Times, citing Neilsen data, says viewership exploded to 81,000, on average one day earlier this month. Fox Business had never previously drawn an audience large enough to be “statistically reliable” by Nielsen.

By contrast, according to USA Today, the financial crisis has been a boon to viewership at CNBC, which has attracted some 722,000 on average last week during daytime hours — its best performance ever.

Keep an eye on: 

• JCDecaux scrapped talks to buy News Corp’s Russian billboard unit, an acquisition which would have created the world’s top billboard advertising group, as the credit crunch made it impossible to fund the deal (Reuters)
• General Electric Co’s Universal Studios has reached an agreement to distribute films by DreamWorks SKG in its new partnership with Reliance ADA Group of India, DreamWorks Chairman Stacey Snider said (Reuters)
• Nielsen Media Research released figures for delayed viewing, and for most television shows the numbers rose, with some adding three million or four million viewers in recorded playback (NY Times)

(Photo: Reuters)

Ask any business reporter covering the financial crisis what they were doing this weekend — the answer is probably not “mowing the lawn” or “doing things that don’t involve work.”

The folks over at Fox Business Network is playing that to their advantage. A new ad, first reported by TVNewser (we think), points out that FBN was broadcasting live news this weekend while brand X, the much larger and older rival network CNBC, was mainly running taped broadcasting.

That said, CNBC was live on Sunday night with a two-hour special, but FBN is taking credit for running live coverage on Sunday morning, reporting that crucial progress had been made in Washington on the $700 billion bailout plan. At the time, spokeswoman Irena Briganti said, CNBC was airing a re-run of Suze Orman. Briganti said FBN also was running live for several hours on Saturday and Sunday while CNBC was not.

The bottom line, according to Fox? “We own this story.” The bottom line, according to CNBC’s Brian Steel? “Judging from our measured ratings alone, which does not include the most affluent homes and out of home viewing like trading floors and C-suites, we know Wall Street, Main Street and the investment community around the world are turning to CNBC and CNBC.com.” In other words: “we think we have more viewers.”

Here’s the ad, which ran in today’s New York Times, Wall Street Journal and on CNBC itself, at least within the New York City area on Time Warner’s cable system.

(Photo courtesy of Fox Business News)