Wide-Eyed Wonder

My kind of town, Chicago is ...

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:04:00 +0000

Nearly 13 years ago, my editor at BusinessWeek warned me to put on my combat helmet when a cover story by a group of us in the Chicago bureau hit the streets. The piece, "Chicago Blues," reported that the city was slipping as a business capital. We discussed how its financial markets were shrinking, it was losing corporate headquarters, high-tech entrepreneurs were making tracks for the Coast and the toddlin' town wasn't even really The Second City anymore -- LA stole that ranking as it became a magnet for Midwesterners and others looking to live in a place on the rise.

All of it was true. And reading about all of it, editor Steve Shepard knew, would really tick off people in Chicago.

Now, it's Rachel Shteir and the editors at the New York Times Book Review who have found -- probably to their dismay -- that it's their turn to get out the flak jackets. Shteir, a New Jersey-born professor at Chicago's DePaul University, lit into the Windy City in a front-page essay for a long list of all-too-unsettling truths. Fifteen-year-olds shot near President Obama's home, racial segregation, financial strain, corrupt politicians -- all of it masked by a boastful swagger about how NYC and other spots can't hold a candle to the city by the lake.

As we did in 2000, Shteir is finding that Chicagoans don't take kindly to national publications -- especially New York-based ones -- saying nasty things about their city. The outpouring of venom directed at her is stunning -- "clueless," "a vampire," "elitist," "mean-spirited," "a poor, sad woman," "maladapted," "a disingenous shithead" and worse. And these were among the more civil comments posted in response to a Chicagomag.com piece, "Rachel Shteir Defends Her Anti-Chicago Essay in a Rare Q&A" by Carol Felsenthal.

The vileness of the responses is far worse than what we encountered, probably because people now feel untethered by any sense of civility when they're sounding off on the Net. Coarseness and abuse are the order of the day, it seems. But the passion, defensiveness and unwillingness to brook any criticism is all too familiar. It's a replay of what we ran into -- honest, open and full discussion? Fuggedaboutit! Critical self-examination? Don't bug me, a----le!

In fairness, we had some good thrust-and-parry discussions involving smart people. WTTW invited a colleague and coauthor of the piece, Roger Crockett, and me, onto "Chicago Tonight" to face off against Paul O'Connor of World Business Chicago and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce's Jerry Roeper. Sure, we argued, but we all behaved like gentlemen, mostly. Indeed, Shteir appeared on the station with Phil Ponce to explain her criticisms, proving that the folks at WTTW have a lot of class. At a couple commercial stations, I've read, the hosts vented their outrage, but didn't share the stage with Shteir (I don't know if they invited her on or not).

But back in the BW storm, we also got blindsided. Some economic heavyweights staged a panel discussion at the Chicago Fed, as I recall, to explore Chicago's economic health. But it was anything but a full and balanced discussion. It was more a highbrow ambush with nary a negative word to be heard. One would have thought Chicago was Edenic. The folks there didn't bother asking me or anyone from BW to join them on the dais to make our case, but rather were happy to hold forth as if our arguments weren't worth the trouble. Instead, they just ignored the data we had mustered and focused on things such as how bad traffic was, a sure sign of health, as I recall economist Diane Swonk arguing. Swonk in fact had a point about traffic, but what did that have to do with the losses of corporate headquarters, the inability of Sears to innovate and the fiery arguments at the Chicago futures exchanges about whether to modernize to try to catch up to European rivals?

As Shteir is finding, boosters will just change the grounds of the argument when uncomfortable truths don't suit them. Can't win the fight on your opponent's terms? Just change the terms. Sadly, the ugly truths don't go away. And the social problems Shteir is talking about -- the crime, corruption and growing number of murders -- seem to be moving even into better neighborhoods now. Check out the problems in Old Town with gangs on DNAinfo.comChicago, if you doubt that.

Shteir got under the skin of Mayor Rahm Emanuel with her polemic. His response: “Meet the people. Meet our neighborhoods. We have a lot to offer, which is why we’re a world-class city," according to Felsenthal. That kind of shallow boosterism echoed what we heard from Mayor Daley. Not satisfied with a Q&A with him that we ran with the BW piece, Daley responded with a long letter that ended with "Life is good in Chicago, and it's only going to get better." Tragically, the gang violence and the continuing tragedy that is the Chicago school system both suggest otherwise.

Felsenthal goes over much of this ground in a couple posts in her blog in Chicagomag.com. Both the posts and the comments are worth a glance.

For my money, Shteir's broadside doesn't say enough about the many wondrous things about Chicago. The lakefront is unmatched. Michigan Avenue is a treasure. Neighborhoods, especially on the north side, are charming and liveable. New York, by contrast, is too crowded and just too much. The Cubs are great fun, though it would be nice if they won more often. The city has great art, great music, great culture, delightful restaurants. And, despite the invective hurled at Shteir, it has some great people.

But all that is at risk if Chicago can't solve its corrosive problems, and the first step is facing up to them, not facing down the messenger. We wrote a lot in the BW piece about the shortcomings of the futures exchanges but, since then, those folks got their act together (we cannot take credit for that. I'm sure it was more a matter of dollars and common sense). They merged the Board of Trade and the Merc to form a global titan, CME Group. Bravo! Sadly, the city's banking community is now mostly a ward of distant banking giants. Outfits that were once the pride of Chicago, such as Sears, are now pathetic shells. I wonder what we would find if we looked anew at the city's business health (Note to the Bloomberg Businessweek bureau: take a look).

Chicago, to be sure, is not soon to become another Detroit, as Shteir suggests. It doesn't depend on a sole industry that can suffer a near-death experience and take a city down with it. But will it look more like Detroit in, say, 25 years than it does today? That turns in part on whether the city can solve the problems people like Shteir have the guts to bring up, no matter what abuse they suffer for doing that.

Mrs. Thatcher, Simon Warner and me

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 11:21:00 +0000

Thanks to the Prime Minister of England, Simon Warner and I met 33 years ago. Now, because of that PM’s death and the marvels of the Net, we’ve met again – electronically at least. And in that lay an intriguing tale of media, globalization and winding career paths.

Credit Margaret Thatcher first of all. The feisty Conservative lioness, derided or admired as “the Iron Lady,” was running the U.K. when I was lucky enough in 1980 to be chosen for a journalism exchange program created by the English-Speaking Union. Chartered by the Queen, the E-SU promotes friendship among English-speaking peoples and had enough clout to get me into 10 Downing St. to sit with the PM for a while.

Imagine what a thrill this was for a 25-year-old reporter for a little New Jersey paper, The Home News. Mostly, I wrote about small-town mayors and the occasional county official. Now, I would get to interview a sitting PM, one who cut a swath culturally and politically almost as big as that of her buddy, Ronald Reagan. Some loved her, many hated her and I’d get to write about her.

The ways of politicians can be mysterious, of course, so things didn’t turn out quite as I expected.

Simon, right in the photo above, was the first surprise. Someone decided a young American reporter should be paired with a young British reporter for a sit-down with Mrs. Thatcher. That was no problem, of course. We met at 10 Downing St. on the big day, July 14, equally excited about our big interview. Back then, exclusivity wouldn’t matter much, since we worked on different continents.

But then, as we waited in an anteroom, the PM’s PR man delivered the bad news. The London media were in high dudgeon about a couple young journos – one an American! – getting access to Thatcher when she had no time for them. Some reporter even wrote a snarky piece about it (long before anyone heard the word snarky). So, the conversation would have to be off the record. No notebooks, no tape recorders, no interview story.

Weeks of boning up went out the window, but, okay, we’d meet anyway. And we did. We had a fine time, talking mostly about innocuous things, such as her son’s adventures around the world. Mostly, Simon and I listened, unable to get a word in edgewise with the imposing Mrs. Thatcher (not that she needed us to, of course). Simon’s editors, with the help of a local Member of Parliament, later negotiated the chance for him to write about the conversation a bit for his paper, The Chester Observer. I got a piece for my paper out of the visit, but just shared my impressions of the PM and spelled out her successes, failures and fights in office. Happily, we could run the photo of the meeting.

Fast forward to this past week. Touched by Mrs. Thatcher’s death, I tracked down Simon, with just a few clicks on Google (smiling in the head shot to the right, above, today). He rose through the ranks in journalism, becoming arts editor at a couple regional papers in the 1980s, did media relations in arts and education, and became a live rock reviewer for The Guardian during the 1990s. He earned a master’s in popular music studies, then a Ph.D., and now serves as a Lecturer at Leeds University. He’s a prolific writer, with at least five books about major cultural figures dear to Boomers. These include “Rockspeak: The Language of Rock and Pop,” “Howl for Now: A celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s epic protest poem,” “The Beatles and the Summer of Love,” “New York, New Wave: From Max’s and the Mercer to CBGBs and the Mudd Club,” and his latest, the just-issued “Text and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture.”

The similarities in our career paths intrigue me. We both wound up working for national pubs and both wound up leaving workaday journalism for the academy. Though I spent my career mostly in business news, we also both have written about popular culture and figures important to fellow Boomers (my book about the legacy of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles guru, and his followers’ community in Fairfield, Iowa, is due out early next year). We’re both fans of the Beats (though I mostly left them behind in high school, while Simon has dug deeply into those folks and the long shadow they've cast. Gotta love the photo on his latest book cover).

Nowadays, we both also wonder about the future of journalism. Simon emailed me about it: “The media business remains close to my heart but how can print survive? Transatlantically, the great newspaper empires are caught on the horns of a dilemma. Can paywalls work? Can Internet advertising eventually bridge the losses to income that traditional papers, with their shrinking readerships, are suffering? The Guardian, to which I contributed for several years, is attempting to raise its US profile but can that bring dividends? Meanwhile, the middle-market Daily Mail is proving a web hit, of course, overtaking the NYT in terms of visitors!”

Also like me, Simon blogs. He wrote about his media adventures in 2009 in his “Words of Warner.” Interesting read.

So, we’ve enjoyed somewhat parallel lives on different sides of the Atlantic. Their arcs don't quite reflect that of Lady Thatcher, who lived on a far grander stage, of course. But, at a nice point for all of us, our paths crossed. And now, thanks to the same technology that is upending the media, Simon and I get to say hello again. I plan to buy his latest book, snapping it up as an ebook I can read on my iPad. Small and surprising world, isn’t it?

What is McGraw-Hill Worth?

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:52:00 +0000

Just what is a stock worth?

The obvious answer, of course, is what someone will pay for it. And that depends on a host of factors, including the company’s business prospects, the appetite investors have for risk, regulatory challenges and the possibility of big change at the company. Pricing stocks is a gamble with as many variables as a roulette wheel.

So it's amusing when a self-interested investor group pegs a value for a stock, insisting that's what it should fetch if only company managers do what the group wants them to do. Just such a group has done this now with the McGraw-Hill Cos., my hard-pressed former employer. Some will laugh while others, including shareholders such as myself, surely hope the group is close to right.

Jana Partners and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which recently bought up some 5.2% of MHP’s stock, say the outfit is worth $65 a share. But it will take a breakup to unlock that value and lift the stock out of its mire at around $40, the JOT group suggests. JOT is pushing its vision on chief executive officer Terry McGraw, urging him to take a cleaver to an operation his family has run since 1888. The group, whose holdings top those of the McGraw family’s now, aims to jumpstart an ongoing internal strategic review the methodical McGraw has been undertaking.

JOT offers an elaborate argument to arrive at its $65 valuation. Its presentation, replete with Power Point slides filed with the SEC, includes graphs like that above that spell out in precise detail what the value of the stock would be if such elements as the conglomerate discount and the cost of management overhead were factored out. The bar on the right represents the $65 mark; the one on the left, a depressed recent price. It's all very tidy and scientific.

Of course, it's all wishful thinking, despite the veneer of sophistication and precise calculation. JOT, for instance, figures that investors knock $11 off the share price just because the company is a conglomerate. It pegs the cost of the corporate cost structure at $6 a share. Once those millstones disappear -- poof! -- the stock rises, right?. And it says a buyback of stock, together with enhanced profit margins equaling those of peers, would push up share value another $7.50. Voila, $65.

Despite the numbers, there's really nothing new about JOT's thinking. The view that McGraw-Hill is worth more in pieces than as a single, un-synergistic, unit is as old as the company's diversification. Critics have long carped that Standard & Poor's has nothing in common with the textbook division. Even within a single division, the information and media services unit, there has been little synergy: before BusinessWeek was sold in 2009 and became Bloomberg Businessweek, it had nothing in common with a group of TV stations MHP put on the market some months ago. As long ago as July 2010, I rooted for a deal of some sort myself to sort out MHP's challenges.

The difference now, though, is the environment. S&P has been set back on its heels by a Justice Department probe of its Pollyanna ratings -- terribly flawed in hindsight -- of mortgage securities prior to the housing crash. News of this investigation broke just after S&P downgraded U.S. Treasury debt to AA+, an unpopular move that has riled Congressional critics. Furthermore, recently enacted law, if not changed, will strip away requirements that securities carry ratings by S&P and its competitors. No wonder the stock plunged to about $35 in early August and rival Fitch Ratings downgraded MHP's debt a notch to A. It all threatens S&P, which is why the outfit has brought in a fix-it man from Citigroup, Douglas Peterson, to take charge.

Then, on the textbook side, hard-pressed states aren't buying many books for students these days. And the Net is making pricey hardbacks look antediluvian, oh so pre-Kindle. Kids will always need learnin' but they might not need to pay so much for it, at least not to textbook companies. This is an existential challenge to the company.

All these pressures, I'm sure, have pinned MHP's shares to the floor. Oh, don't we all pine for the days when the stock rocketed to $71, back in mid-2007. Why would it ever be worth less? Why only $65 post-breakup now? Those Canadian teachers and their buds at Jana have talked up the value a bit, adding $5 a share so far with their lushly detailed charts and sharp calculations. Thorough coverage by the Wall Street Journal has helped, too.

But the real value of McGraw-Hill won't be set by chalk-wielding Ontario-dwellers or hedge fund speculators. The market will rule. I'm sure hoping it rules well. Anybody think MHP is worth $100 a share to some savvy buyer? Do I hear $125?

Eastward Ho! China Beckons

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:19:00 +0000

The Chinese embassy has made it official now. My visa for a semester-long teaching gig at Tsinghua University in Beijing just popped in the front door. So it looks like a year’s preparation will pay off with a nearly four-month stay beginning Sept. 8.

I’m stoked.

The program, organized by the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C., and backed by my Dean, Gary Kebbel, and the far-sighted folks in the administration at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is thrilling. I get to teach two classes to budding Chinese journalists, grad students in the Global Business Journalism program at Tsinghua. They are keen to learn about business and economic coverage and about multi-media journalism.

For my part, I get to learn first-hand about the world’s second-biggest economy as it pushes even further into the global limelight. It will prove to be a fascinating, if paradoxical place, I expect. A “developing country” that is nearly 4,000 years old. The U.S.’s biggest creditor and yet a place with one of the lowest per capita incomes on the planet. A planned economy that seems to work, mostly anyway.

The university I’ll teach in is commonly ranked among the top three in the country. China’s current president, Hu Jintao, studied and taught at the 100-year-old school. Its journalism college, however, dates back to just 2002, as this technologically minded university -- sometimes called the MIT of China -- is still developing its humanities offerings. The ICFJ, led by China hand and former BusinessWeek colleague Joyce Barnathan, has been involved there since just 2007. I’m told the students at the Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication will include some of the brightest kids in China, the likely leaders in their organizations in the future. I’m hoping they will challenge me as much as I challenge them and that, in my small way, I can make some lasting impact that will affect they way they see – and influence – the world.

It’s a daunting prospect. Will they behave like American students – in good and bad ways? Will they question and argue, for instance (probably not, I’m told, since deference to the teacher is a Chinese cultural trait)? Can I teach them about the cut and thrust of good journalism? Will they understand American-style journalism at all, or have a wholly different notion of the mission of media? Just think about how much some major pubs in China get quoted here as, more or less, the voice of officialdom.

Then there are the personal issues. Will the government particularly care what I have to say in the classroom or on the Net? Will it pay attention in either place? There are so many academic visitors to China from the U.S. nowadays that keeping track could be impossible and pointless for folks in official ranks. The Chinese want what we have to offer, especially in areas such as business and economic journalism. They think it a crucial skill as their business communities grow and globalize, and they’re right about that.

I’m going, however, as much as a student as I am a teacher. I’ve always felt that missionaries were fundamentally arrogant, assuming that they were bringing the truth to the ignorant masses. I’m a bit contemptuous – though usually more amused -- when they knock at my door. So I’ll pack a sense of humility along with my syllabi. Yes, I can teach my young charges some useful skills – just as I do back home in Nebraska – but I expect I’ll learn far more from them and their country. China, after all, does have a few years on us in the U.S. as a civilization.

I plan to keep a blog of my experiences. This opportunity will vastly enrich me as a teacher, not to mention how much it could broaden my worldview. The three-week trip colleague Bruce Thorson and I took to Kazakhstan with eight students last year was good preparation. It gave me a sense of how people in a developing place look on us in the West, and on how they look on life in general. I expect to get more than a glimmer of that in the coming semester and look forward to sharing that both here and in classes to come.

Stay tuned. Should be one heckuva trip.

Cojones at Standard & Poor's

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 01:50:00 +0000

You’ve got to hand it to the folks at Standard & Poor’s. It took cojones to stand up to the Treasury Department and give an honest assessment of U.S. debt and the problems of dysfunctional government. The downgrade to AA+ doesn’t make up for the misses the outfit was guilty of in the financial crisis and doesn’t atone for its seemingly willing blindness to the fool’s paradise we were living in. But its clear-eyed view of the shadows on our horizon now is worth a bundle.

The big question, though, is whether it will make a difference. The U.S. will not default, no matter how keen the GOP pols are to use threats such as that. Investors know that and they won’t flee Treasury securities. Where would they go anyway? Investors have known the same things S&P has known for months and still the yields on Treasurys are at historic lows. Putting money into the government bonds is safer than any bank, and that won’t change anytime soon, as even our tut-tutting creditors in China know.

Still, the grand game of “chicken” will continue in D.C. for the rest of the year, at least, and the downgrade could make a difference in how the game is played. The Gang of 12 – the bipartisan panel that is supposed to decide our financial fate – will have S&P’s jaundiced judgment to bear in mind as they go through their ideological faceoff. As they try to resolve problems that should have been dealt with in recent weeks, the prospect of a continued low rating, or even a further downgrade, could focus their minds on the consequences of fiscal mismanagement and dithering. Their debate, too, could keep a dead hand on the markets.

Politics, and the prospects of ousting a President, will weigh heavily on those folks, no doubt. The temptation to deny President Obama a victory – a financial resolution that would serve the country well – will be just about irresistible for half that panel. Maybe S&P’s independent judgment will prove to be a bracing slap of cold water, a reminder that the bloodsport that politics has become does have real consequences outside the Beltway. Voters could make judgments about mismanagement similar to that S&P folks made and simply throw all the bums out.

But it is too easy to cast this drama as simply a matter of gaining political advantage. This is much more than just naked opportunism. This fight is over the real and yawning ideological gulf between the parties. It is all about the longstanding argument over the size and role of government that has colored every election since at least the Reagan days. The Californian shook up prevailing wisdom in D.C. and made people believe government was the problem, not the solution – a view that is echoed decades later by the likes of Rep. Eric Cantor and, of course, the Tea Party movement.

The “two different worldviews” that divide Washington are too far apart for anything more than an armistice, Cantor suggested in a Wall Street Journal piece today. The Virginia Republican argued that expanding the welfare state and redistributing income are key parts of the Democratic playbook. “The assumption … is that there is some kind of perpetual engine of economic prosperity in America that is going to just continue,” Cantor said. “And therefore they are able to take from those who create and give to those who don’t. We just have a fundamentally different view.”

Beyond that is the Keynesian-supply-sider divide. Keynesians such as New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman say Obama and Washington aren’t doing enough to use government money to stimulate the lackluster economy. By contrast, the GOP leaders invoke economist Arthur Laffer’s dictum – the Laffer Curve – to argue that tax cuts would be far more effective than government spending, especially when so much of the government money is borrowed. Variations of this debate are as old as the Great Depression and economists still are split on whether the government pulled us out that 1930s slump or prolonged it with government programs.

These are serious disputes, and unresolved economic questions. It comes to a matter of faith, of whether you worship at the Church of Laffer or the Congregation of Krugman. And, lately, it comes to a matter of who has the power to either turn on the government spigot or choke it off and, in theory, let the economy heal itself. Problem is, with a 9.1% unemployment rate, an outrageous amount of debt and the never-ending political campaign that Washington has become, the power centers and the course are anything but clear.

That’s partly why we should tip our hat to S&P. The outfit, the economic engine of my former longtime employer, McGraw-Hill Cos., didn’t bow to what had to have been enormous pressure from Washington in coming to its judgment. We can only imagine the debates that raged at company headquarters: Will this downgrade lead to higher interest costs for all Americans? What are the consequences when the economy is so weak? And what of the unlikely possibility that vengeful government regulators could make life tougher for S&P and McGraw-Hill, especially at a time when McGraw-Hill is facing pressure to reorganize or sell itself?

In fact, it’s a remarkable thing about our system that Washington can’t dictate terms to S&P. One can’t imagine that kind of independence in some other major global economies. Wall Street and Washington intersect at crucial points but neither can dictate to the other. That’s a priceless strength of our system and it would have been a sorry statement if S&P had caved to Treasury.

It is fascinating, of course, to see these warring economic visions collide. But this is no classroom exercise, no parlor game. The entertainment value is far outweighed by the size of the stakes. What Washington does will affect the livelihoods of millions, the legacy our kids inherit, and the role of the U.S. in the world. It doesn’t get much more serious than that. It will take smart and independent people to help the pols to chart the way.

Journalistic death, evolution and The Tree of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:56:00 +0000

I just saw the Terrence Malick opus “The Tree of Life,” the 139-minute meditation on God, evil, love, death, evolution and a tortured upbringing in the 1950s. No date movie this, but it certainly gives a viewer something to chew on. Kind of like “2001” meets a dark, dark version of the Hardy Boys. It does have a ring of truth to it, despite its grand self-importance and distinct lack of humor.

The peculiar thing is it puts me in mind of two unsettling developments in the news business this week, the cancellation of Eliot Spitzer’s effort at redemption, “In The Arena,” and the shutdown of the News of the World. The connection may seem remote – chalk and cheese -- but bear with me, dear reader.

First off, both these deaths of journalistic enterprises were sad but perhaps inevitable, much like the death at the center of the movie. The movie revolves around the loss, at 19, of a young man whose problem seems to be his innocence, sensitivity and talent in a life that values such things too little. The boy’s passing was crucial to explore the movie’s central tension – the question of whether life is about grace and wonder or torment and struggle. Are we all doomed to life as a matter of “nature red in tooth and claw” or is there a divine force that brings love and justice to the chaos?

To bring this idea round to the end of the Spitzer program and the British tabloid, the question is, were these journalistic deaths just? Further, what do they say about the nature of the world of journalism today? What do they say about the torments and struggles of individuals and enterprises? And what do they say about the evolution of our media?

In Spitzer’s case, the cancellation at base was a matter of ratings and viewership. The show was just pulling too small of a viewership for CNN, which is struggling to compete with the ideologically driven appeal of Fox News, as well as the glut of “content” that afflicts all media in the Internet age. On one level, the show’s fall is yet another example of the evolution of journalism, with the inevitable deaths of outmoded approaches this brings.

A guy sitting at desk commenting on the news of the day, with interviews – especially of other CNN pundits – just doesn’t cut it these days. Viewers need more or they’ll turn away and troll for news and information on the Net or elsewhere on the tube. This is part of the reason that conventional TV news is struggling. Such is true also of print news operations.

But Spitzer’s fall was more than that. Spitzer is a tragic figure, someone every bit as tormented and driven as the character Brad Pitt plays in “The Tree of Life.” The Pitt figure longs to be a musician but instead is a would-be entrepreneur stuck in a deadend factory executive role. He’s tortured and in turn torments those around him, including his wife and sons, as he wrestles with a life where he sees only deception and money as the driving forces. He’s cold and distant, an angry and intense figure, a sad archetype of a certain kind of 1950s father.

Spitzer, it seems to me, is every bit as cold, and someone constantly at war with inner demons. By some accounts, during his tenure as Attorney General in New York he bullied defendants, especially corporate executives. He beat them into submission, often by going outside the rules of the courtroom. He likewise brought an intensity to “In The Arena” that reflected no humor, no grace, only a penetrating and cold intellect. He’s a smart guy and a relentless questioner, but every night was a painful struggle with issues of political venality and ideology.

How much of that can an audience take? It proved too much for most viewers, it would seem. Indeed, “The Tree of Life,” with its relentless intensity, is likewise too much at times. It has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

More than that, Spitzer lacked something indispensable to journalism. He had no innocence, something crucial in a news person. He carried far too much baggage as a disgraced former governor whose dalliances with prostitutes may never be forgotten. His demons made him fascinating in a way, as one could imagine the torment that underlay his aggressive questioning of guests. But it ultimately distracted from the core mission of a journalist – to be a reporter or analyst of the news, not a center of attention oneself but rather someone focusing the limelight.

Spitzer, much like the Brad Pitt character, is akin to a figure in classic Greek tragedy. Spitzer was done in by his own grand flaws in the end. He rose to great heights only to fall, twice. The Pitt character is more the tortured victim of outside forces, but his personal flaws figure into his failed home life.

Tragedy is too grand a word, however, for the News of the World case. Certainly it is discomfiting for the people tossed out of work there. And it’s a disappointment, perhaps, for the hundreds of thousands who bought the paper each week, however trashy it was. The world will be poorer, perhaps, for the silencing of yet another once-powerful journalistic voice. But by most accounts the paper was garbage. Its voice was shrill and vengeful and no exemplar of quality in the field. The loss is hardly worth grieving over.

It may be that News of the World demonstrates that there can be justice in the world. It was killed for its journalistic sins, its inability to draw lines about what newsgathering approaches are appropriate and what are not. Paying off cops and hacking into phone mail, as alleged of the paper, is just not right. Fleet Street in general should learn from this sorry case and one hopes that Rupert Murdoch’s commitment to quality papers, such as The Times, Sunday Times and The Wall Street Journal, will only be deepened by this. Maybe it could even make Fox News less shrill.

Sometimes, deaths are appropriate. That was not true in “The Tree of Life.” It may be so for “In The Arena” and the News of the World, sorry cases whose passing will help journalism evolve.

BusinessWeek Magazine, the Muse

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:23:00 +0000

For much of its recent history, BusinessWeek has been an incubator for talented writers and reporters. Under editors Steve Shepard, Steve Adler and now Josh Tyrangiel, the place has been a literary hotbed. Many BW staffers couldn't limit themselves to the glossy pages, but had to break into books. The remake into Bloomberg Businessweek, with its traumatic turnover in staff, stoked that flame for some, as a recent outpouring of work shows. But the trend shows signs of continuing.

Here, in its splendid variety, is a collection of recent (and not so recent) work by this talented bunch:

2011

Larry Light sallied forth against the forces of darkness. "... [P]erfect summer reading fare. The author, a financial reporter and editor, is a skilled storyteller. In this book he explores a range of investment strategies and instruments, traces their development, and in the process profiles some of the best-known investors and academics." BRENDA JUBIN, Seeking Alpha

Dori Jones Yang waxed historical. "Yang has done an excellent job describing 14th century Mongolia, and by including the familiar character of Marco Polo she has a seamless way to weave all of the amazing facts about this setting into the narrative while rarely dragging down the story. A refreshing change of pace from a lot of the historical fiction/romance out there today! (And a brief aside: a book with a wonderful cover! After the whitewashing controversies of the last few years, 2011 is shaping up to be an amazing year for proudly putting the faces of characters of color on covers!)" BOOKISH BLATHER "The language is believable, and the descriptions of customs, foods, and places during that time period are vivid and engaging.... History is brought alive in this novel, and I enjoyed getting a glimpse of Chinese and Mongolian history mixed with a bit of adventure." SQUEAKY CLEAN READS

Dori Jones Yang also remained a scribe. "The oral histories in this book provide valuable primary-source material about the so-called 'lost generation' of Chinese Americans, those who came as students in the 1940s through 1960s. This book fills a gap in our knowledge and will enrich the studies of academic researchers analyzing the experience of the Chinese diaspora."EVELYN HU-DEHART, Brown University. "Academics and researchers will find this book of oral history an indispensable resource to study a long overlooked group of Chinese immigrants in America." PETER KWONG, Hunter College

Celine Keating's new novel is piling up the praise: "Céline Keating's deftly plotted novel takes readers on a gripping journey along the underground railroad of post-'60s radicalism. . . . Every adult has to reinterpret the story of her childhood. Keating beautifully demonstrates the courage it takes for each of us to face that bittersweet truth." LARRY DARK, Director of The Story Prize "A beautiful book--at once nostalgic and fresh--that will go straight to your heart and lodge there." ALETHEA BLACK, author of I Knew You'd Be Lovely "[An] emotional page-turner. Layla's coming to terms with her parents' dangerous activism is heart wrenching due to Keating's delightfully drawn characters. This novel also serves as a compelling lesson in our values and how drastically they've changed. It serves as a better history than any essay or screed." SUSAN BRAUDY, author of Family Circle. Intriguing trailer, too.

So, too, is Amy Cortese's new effort in nonfiction. “If Michael Pollan changed the way you think about food, let Amy Cortese change the way you think about finance.” JAY LEE “Locavesting uses great storytelling to present a structured analysis of how and why to invest where you live and in the (mostly) small businesses there. Each aspect of Locavesting is brought to life by sketches of real people who impress, amuse, and intrigue.” CLIFFORD J. REEVES “This is one of the best books I have ever read on the topic of financing small business growth.” RODNEY LOGES

As is the effort by Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald. “…the latest, and probably the best, of what one might call the “private sector” books about the BP spill…by a pair of talented and experienced Bloomberg reporters.” FINANCIAL TIMES "The two journalists make a logical team, and their book is often enlightening about the corporate-political nexus that placed enrichment of the already rich and aggrandizement of the already influential above the common good." USA TODAY

Stephen Baker's takeout on the advance of the computer into the game-show realm proved intriguing. "Like Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine (1981), Baker’s book finds us at the dawn of a singularity. It’s an excellent case study, and does good double duty as a Philip K. Dick scenario, too." KIRKUS REVIEWS "Final Jeopardy not only holds the answers to my ... questions, but really delves into the man vs. machine thought. How do we as humans learn a language? How do we measure perception? And then once we know all of this, how do we teach it to a machine? If you are even the slightest bit interested in artificial intelligence this book is for you. At the same time, it is not so down in the computery depths that someone who knows little of data-mining algorithms won't be able to understand. I think it is a very accessible book." Julia, THE BROKE AND THE BOOKISH

Steve Hamm, with a couple coauthors, weighed in about machines, too. “IBM doesn’t just THINK, it thinks big. The story of these big ideas illustrates how 100 years of innovation have shaped the way we live and work today.” KENNETH CHENAULT, American Express. “Making the World Work Better convincingly documents IBM’s enormous impact on business and the world. Its history provides vital lessons for organizations of all sizes, and IBM’s future promises to continue to innovate the way we work, and even think.” HENRY CHESBROUGH, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley "Innovation, resilience, and great leadership are the key ingredients of the IBM story. Making the World Work Better tells that story exceptionally well. Ultimately, it reveals that IBM is not simply a technology company; it is a company of ideas and the future those ideas have created." JOHN HOLLAR, Computer History Museum

William J. Holstein takes a look at what ails us. "[A] timely prescription for what our country must do to regain its financial fortitude and reinvigorate our national economy. While many believe that America faces an inevitable decline and loss of global leadership to emerging Asian economies as we exhaust our ability to innovate and compete, Holstein offers a more optimistic assessment of American industry and its ability to rise to the challenge." PETER G. BALBUS, Pragmaxis LLC "If wishful thinking were dollars, this book would be a gold mine. As it is, Holstein provides an optimistic but not necessarily candy-colored view of a resurgent American economy." KIRKUS REVIEWS

Alethea Black is winning lots of fans with her fiction. “This debut reads like a dream, with nary a false note…" KIRKUS REVIEWS. “A sense of vulnerable restlessness is betrayed by the otherwise pragmatic characters of Black’s strong debut collection.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “Alethea Black is downright brilliant at capturing the restless striving for a self that we all are feeling in this parlous and unsettling age. I Knew You’d Be Lovely is a splendidly resonant debut by an important young writer.” ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, author of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain

Chris Roush created a must-have text for budding business journalists and updated it nicely with this new edition. I use it in my classes. There can be no stronger endorsement! This is a keeper.

Sandra Dallas extended her long run. "[A] winning combination of solid historical fiction,vivid enduring characters,and an interesting story that pulls the reader right in. Sandra Dallas is at the top of her game with THE BRIDE'S HOUSE...an excellent read." BOOKREPORTER.COM

2010

Chris Roush, with a colleague, offered a helpful tutorial. "The book is an invaluable guide to helping you get business right, understand it, and explain it. Which is, of course, what we all should be trying to do." ALLAN SLOAN, Fortune magazine "An essential interpretive guide for business journalists striving to make the arcane clear to readers. Very practical references for today's changing business climate." PATRICK SCOTT, Charlotte Observer "A comprehensive reference tool for virtually every phrase a business or economics reporter or editor needs to know. An indispensable guide both for specialists and especially for those who get thrust into covering business or economic stories." GREG DAVID, Crain's New York Business

Sandra Dallas kept them coming. "Dallas presents another historical novel about the hardscrabble mining communities of Colorado, set just down the road from her best-selling Prayers for Sale (2009), creating a patchwork of individuals whose lives had not intersected until this singular, transformative event. Readers may find the abrupt transitions and preponderance of flashbacks confusing and distancing. Dallas is well known for her storytelling abilities, but this reads more like a valediction of a time and place faded from memory than her usual vibrant, visceral tale. Still, Dallas is a magnet." LYNNE WELCH, Booklist

Another standout from Hardy Green. “Taking in textile, coal, oil, lumber and appliance-manufacturing towns, Mr. Green’s survey is a useful one…. [T]he company towns overseen by Milton Hershey, Francis Cabot Lowell and even Charlie Cannon were communities enlivened by quirks and passions and idiosyncratic visions. Edens? Hardly. But they had soul, and you can neither buy nor sell that at the company store.” WALL STREET JOURNAL “Mr. Green sprints – at times breathlessly – through all kinds of company towns, mostly past but some present…. He uses these accounts, in tandem with a clean, engaging voice, to tell story upon story…. Mr. Green has amassed a collection of important, well-told stories about the contradictions, inequities and possibilities of American capitalism.” NEW YORK TIMES “[A] delightful book.” THE ECONOMIST

Andrew Park weighed in on matters of faith. "He discusses his parents’ religious upbringing and the impact it had on him. His father, for instance, was raised in the Church of Scotland, the forebear of Presbyterianism, which left him with unpleasant memories that he passed on to Park; meanwhile, Park’s older brother converted to modern Evangelical Christianity. Whether writing about his family or Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch, Park remains a father trying to delicately balance the responsibilities of parenthood and being true to himself. A lovely read." JUNE SAWYERS, Booklist "Park puts on his journalist's hat to explore the sociological backdrop of periods in America when religion experienced growth and upheaval. He examines his own inconstant feelings and discovers he has pragmatic reasons to be drawn to faith, including the community it provides. Ultimately his investigations bring Park back where he started, but with new insight. He attends a seminar about how to raise ethical children without religion and seems to have found his own holy grail: It's OK to be a doubting dad." MICHELLE BOORSTEIN, Washington Post.

Arlene Weintraub has made some marketers nervous. "Weintraub, a former senior writer for BusinessWeek, portrays the hormone replacement sector as a cesspool of unproven claims, unacknowledged side-effects, and marketing scams. It's also a zoo of colorful quacks, presided over by actress Suzanne Somers, author of best-selling alternative medicine treatises. Weintraub mixes acute reportage with a censorious tone; she deplores the notion that old age is a disease." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Wrinkles, fat, and low libido start to sound pretty good after reading this unnerving exposé by journalist Arlene Weintraub. Her elixir of deep research and smooth storytelling delivers a sometimes-gag-inducing dose of reality..." FAST COMPANY "Weintraub generates plenty of feverish prose and cautionary tales to highlight this powerfully seductive syllogism of the "anti-aging industry..." AARP Magazine

Chris Farrell caught the sense of the times. “Chris Farrell provides practical guidance about how to manage personal finances. In a nutshell, which is a great disservice to the author, Farrell -- who hosts a radio show on NPR-- advocates implementing a margin of safety in investing and a return to the frugality that many of us grew up with…the world would be a better place if more people followed his common sense advice.” NEWARK STAR LEDGER "The title of this book hooked me from the start. What am I writing about at The Simple Dollar if I’m not writing about “the new frugality” Chris Farrell, the author of the book, is a name I’m familiar with having been a long-time faithful listener of Marketplace Money (and it’s other Marketplace brethren) on NPR. I expected a well-written book that offered lots of insightful thoughts on the “new frugality” along with some practical tips. That’s precisely what I got. Let’s dig in." CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR “[The New Frugality] will help you spend less and save more…This book is filled with anecdotes, historical insights, resources and common sense, all of which are designed to teach you how to wisely spend your money while saving for the future.” THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC

Giles Blunt added to a shelf groaning with work. “As distinctively Canadian as a Tom Thomson painting. . . . Crime Machine is as good as Canadian crime fiction gets.” MARGARET CANNON, The Globe and Mail “A marvelously controlled writer, equally confident with characters and narrative.” TORONTO STAR “First-rate series. . . .You can hear the crunch of snowshoes through the bush, smell the buckshot mingling with fresh blood.” NOW (Toronto) “Another winner from one of Canada’s leading crime writers.” THE PETERBOROUGH EXAMINER

Joan Hamilton came to Meg Whitman's aid. “Meg Whitman doesn’t just talk about important values such as integrity, accountability, authenticity and courage, she lives them.... In this engaging and honest book, Meg shares these values and how she applied them to pioneering a new model for managing a twenty-first-century company. This book only deepens my admiration for Meg’s leadership.” A.G. LAFLEY, Procter & Gamble. “As an eBay board member, I saw firsthand Meg Whitman’s determination to live and manage by the answer to the question ‘What is the right thing to do?’ as she helped eBay develop its character as a company. This book explores the values she brought to eBay and the values she nurtured at eBay – values that ultimately helped her create a remarkable success story and a powerful consumer brand.” HOWARD SCHULTZ, Starbucks "Meg Whitman makes a compelling connection between achieving success and holding firm to high standards of integrity and personal values. It's clear and effective advice for motivating people to do their very best." W. JAMES MCNERNEY, JR., Boeing

Anthony Bianco plunged into Silicon Valley. "[A] gripping, well-sourced and illuminating book, "The Big Lie" [is] a gossipy and at times vulgar account of the battle of wills between Dunn and Tom Perkins, one of California's wealthiest venture capitalists. Think Tyra Banks meets "American Idol" judge Simon Cowell in a televised food fight... A splendid account of the very flawed stars of HP's sideshow." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE "An authoritative account." NEW YORK TIMES “Bianco’s reporting (and he’s done plenty of it at BusinessWeek) is complete, nasty, with plenty of villains, no heroes, and perhaps one victim… Read this alongside Jeffrey Pfeffer’s recent book, Power, and you will understand much of the dysfunction of Fortune 500 capitalism.” NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

Jay Greene cast a designing eye. "A series of case studies of attractive and efficient design, from journalist Greene, makes a persuasive case for regarding design as an essential component of the development process of any product, which must be attended to at all stages, not just at the end....Through case studies of design-savvy companies like Porsche, Nike, LEGO, OXO, Clif bars, and Virgin Atlantic, Greene discusses the brands' origins and presses home the point that successful companies turn their customers into cultists of a sort, admirers of both the form and function of the products they're using." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Greene provides valuable information and insight for companies in all businesses as he explains the importance of design thinking. He quotes Apple’s Steve Jobs in discussing the iPod, 'It’s design’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.'” MARY WHALEY, Booklist

2009

Joan Hamilton also offered sage counsel to a lawyer. "Well written and engaging, this book opens a door into big city crime and how to address it. A must-read for any would-be prosecutor and urban resident, in particular. It dispels myths about the impact of crimes with a balanced eye on the one wronged, the perpetrator and law enforcement, and should make any California resident comfortable--and hopeful--about seeing Harris in higher office. Hamilton does an excellent job of capturing the prosecutor's perspective without letting this drift into hagiography. M. DUNKERLY, Texas attorney "This book, so clearly and well written, describes a comprehensive and sensible approach for actually reducing crime. Kamala Harris is a no-nonsense prosecutor who has thought about how to address the actual causes of crime, as well as appropriate punishments. Everyone who is concerned about the safety of our neighborhoods, now and in the future, needs to read this book and ask our friends in law enforcement and the judiciary to carefully consider her proposals for reform of the criminal justice system." JANE HICKIE, Stephenville, Texas

Check out Linda Himelstein's much-praised work. "...a colorful chronicle of the rise of a business. Ms. Himelstein, a veteran journalist, keeps her narrative moving neatly along, distilling complex matters of commerce into a clear and readable form." JOSEPH TARTAKOVSKY, The Wall Street Journal. "Himelstein makes Russian history and even current politics come alive through an unlikely narrative thread — the creation of a fortune and the eventual demise of a vodka-producing family." STEVE WEINBERG, USA Today "The book is an impressive feat of research, told swiftly and enthusiastically, and brings depth and substance to a product that is otherwise bereft." JORDAN MACKAY, San Francisco Chronicle

Giles Blunt hit again. "An utterly vivid, completely disturbing account of how thugs with authority unrestrained by the rule of law and untempered by the quality of mercy can go about the physical, mental and emotional destruction of a person." THE GAZETTE "Giles Blunt writes with uncommon grace, style and compassion and he plots like a demon." JONATHAN KELLERMAN, author "A tour de force, sorrowing and direct, sharp as a knife blade, beautifully written — an unforgettable window into the human capacity for cruelty and courage." THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Howard Gleckman, long a pillar of the D.C. bureau, was moved to write about his elders. "Compelling personal stories, helpful information about where to turn for assistance, and ideas for ways to strengthen the safety net that too often fails families facing crisis." JOHN ROTHER, AARP "Howard Gleckman knows first hand about caring for his elderly parents. In his illuminating Caring for Our Parents, Gleckman shines a spotlight on the financial and physical price we pay to help our loved ones in a fractured and inadequate network of long-term care services. As he profiles families who meet those challenges with love, determination, and grace, he raises important questions about how our nation will cope as the enormous Baby Boomer generation ages. Caring for our Parents is a wake-up call to a graying nation." MARY BETH FRANKLIN, Kiplinger's Personal Finance "By telling his personal story and those of others, Howard Gleckman helps us understand why caring for our parents is such a challenge. This is a must read for every Baby Boomer." SUZANNE MINTZ, National Family Caregivers Association

Count Stacy Perman in, too. "Amazon Best of the Month, April 2009: [A] chronicle of how a family-run California hamburger joint went on to become an American pop culture icon.... If you've never had an In-N-Out burger, Perman's book just might inspire you to find a good reason to get yourself to Southern California and seek out an off-the-menu 3x3 with a side of Animal Style fries." BRAD THOMAS PARSONS Intriguing video of Stacy, too.

Sandra Dallas wowed 'em. "In her charming new novel, Dallas (The Persian Pickle Club; Tallgrass; etc.) offers up the unconventional friendship between Hennie Comfort, a natural storyteller entering the twilight of her life, and Nit Spindle, a naïve young newlywed, forged in the isolated mining town of Middle Swan, Colo., in 1936.... This satisfying novel will immediately draw readers into Hennie and Nit's lives, and the unexpected twists will keep them hooked through to the bittersweet denouement." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "*Starred Review* Like the lives narrated, this novel, by the author of Tallgrass (2007), runs the gamut of heartache, hardship, and happiness as Dallas skillfully weaves past into present and surprises everyone at the end. Fans of Lee Smith (Fair and Tender Ladies, 1988), Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees, 2002), and Kaye Gibbons (Charms for the Easy Life, 2003), will love this book." JEN BAKER, Booklist

2008

Sandra Dallas nailed another. "An ugly murder is central to this compelling historical, but the focus is on one appealing family, the Strouds, in the backwater town of Ellis, Colo. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government rounded up all the Japanese residents of the West Coast and shipped them off to "internment camps" for the duration of the war. One of the camps is Tallgrass, based on an actual Colorado camp, as Dallas (The Chili Queen) explains in her acknowledgments. The major discomforts and petty indignities these (mostly) American citizens had to endure are viewed through the clear eyes of a young girl who lives on a nearby farm, Rennie Stroud.... Dallas's terrific characters, unerring ear for regional dialects and ability to evoke the sights and sounds of the 1940s make this a special treat." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Dallas has made a major contribution to a growing body of literature about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Based on the one camp in Colorado (named Amache, and renamed Tallgrass by the author), the story focuses on the impact it had on the local farmers and townspeople....Part mystery, part historical fiction, part coming-of-age story, Tallgrass has all the elements of a tale well told: complex characters, intriguing plot, atmospheric detail, pathos, humor, and memorable turns of phrase. But most of all, the book offers a fresh look at a theme that can never be ignored: the interplay of good and evil within society and within people." ROBERT SAUNDERSON,Berkeley Public Library, CA, School Library Journal

Alex Beam has made quite a mark, too. "Alex Beam's colourful history narrates how this extraordinary project got off the ground at the University of Chicago, under the stewardship of chalk-and-cheese duo Robert Hutchins (who, a friend said, "made homosexuals of us all") and Mortimer Adler (who "often added his own works to Great Books reading lists for courses he taught")." STEVEN POOLE, Guardian "Boston Globe columnist Beam looks at how and why this multi-year project took shape, what it managed to accomplish (or not), and the lasting effects it had on college curricula (in the familiar form of Dead White Males). Beam (Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital) describes meetings endured by the selection committee, and countless debates ... but tells it like it is regarding the Syntopicon they devised-at "3,000 subtopics and 163,000 separate entries, not exactly a user-friendly compendium"-and the resulting volumes, labeling them "icons of unreadability-32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type." By lauding the intent and intelligently critiquing the outcome, Beam offers an insightful, accessible and fair narrative on the Great Books, its time, and its surprisingly significant legacy." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Steve Hamm pursued the ideal. “This is a really remarkable book! Covering past, present, and-most excitingly-the future of mobiles, it brings back extremely vivid memories to me and puts in context the many challenges and great opportunities still out there.” JOHN ELLENBY, creator of the GRiD Compass, the first laptop computer “If you have a couple of mobile devices in your pocket and wonder why there isn't a perfect single device, this book is for you.” ROBERT SCOBLE, the Scobleizer blog and former chief blogger for Microsoft

Giles Blunt ventured into the youth market. "Blunt presents readers with a well-crafted plot and lovable, eccentric characters who are magnetizing from page one. Teens will fall in love with this handsome, insightful 18-year-old and his questionable girlfriend, and will be charmed by this quirky, fast-paced tale." ELLEN BELL, Amador Valley High School, Pleasanton, CA

Steve Baker did some close counting on this one. "In this captivating exploration of digital nosiness, business reporter Baker spotlights a new breed of entrepreneurial mathematicians (the numerati) engaged in harnessing the avalanche of private data individuals provide when they use a credit card, donate to a cause, surf the Internet—or even make a phone call.... An intriguing but disquieting look at a not too distant future when our thoughts will remain private, but computers will disclose our tastes, opinions, habits and quirks to curious parties, not all of whom have our best interests at heart." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "This is a fascinating outing of the hidden yet exploding world of digital surveillance and stealthy intrusions into our decision-making processes as we buy food, make a date, or vote for president. Yet, as Baker assures us, we are not helpless. For one thing, machines still can’t process sarcasm. Read and resist." DONNA SEAMAN, Booklist

Michael Mandel waxed academic. Another text I use in my biz-econ journalism class. Need you know more?

2007

Tony Bianco went shopping. “[The Bully of Bentonville]…is filled with direct quotations from current and former Wal-Mart employees, paraphrased anecdotes from Wal-Mart lore, Sam Walton legends, data from government documents and studies from academic researchers such as Basker. Not a single page…is boring, whether the reader is a Wal-Mart lover, Wal-Mart hater, or a conflicted in-between sometimes shopper.” THE KANSAS CITY STAR “In The Bully of Bentonville Bianco produces the most penetrating examination of Wal-Mart’s business practices and their ripple effects in American society that has been published since Wal-Mart watching became a serious pursuit of the business press and academia.” THE STAR TELEGRAM

Ann Therese Palmer, a devoted grad of Notre Dame, showed her fealty to alma mater. "This book is a great read. It includes letter from early Notre Dame female grads along with other famous ND folks who were there when coeducation began. Included are letters from sports coaches and the first female ND undergraduate." PAUL BLILEY JR. "This book is amazing! Reading all the stories and experiences of Notre Dame women pioneers, famous Notre Dame graduates, and various administrators is inspiring! Read the book, it's wonderful!" R. O'CONNOR, BingoBooks

Paul Barrett wrapped this one up on Steve Adler's watch at BW. "Paul M. Barrett has written a rich book full of insights into a religion many Americans don't know enough about." CHICAGO TRIBUNE "A thoughtful exploration that is both comforting and alarming . . . American Islam reveals the variety of Muslim experience in the U.S., as well as profound aspects of Islam that are underappreciated in this country." THE WALL STREET JOURNAL "Well wrought and engaging . . . A welcome antidote to the wide spread Islamophobia that has infected so many Americans over the last five years . . . The book makes a compelling argument that the greatest tool in America's arsenal in the 'war on terror' may be its own thriving and thoroughly assimilated Muslim community." THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

And he is nailing down this one, the story of the fast and deadly growth of the Glock semiautomatic pistol due in January, under the mag's current editor, Josh Tyrangiel. Barrett put the topic in his sights with a cover story, tied to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. Paul has talked about the subject, too.

Julia Flynn Siler knows a bit about wine, it seems. "Call it Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama, Biblical strife, Freudian acting out or even soap opera. You wouldn't be exaggerating, and you wouldn't be wrong...." ERIC ASIMOV, The New York Times "[A] lesson in business, family, greed and hubris that reads like a thriller novel. You will never look at a glass of wine the same way again." GEOFF OLDFATHER, Treasure Coast Palm "With stellar reporting and clear, enjoyable writing Julia Flynn Siler... describes the long rise and sharp descent of California's most iconic vintner ... her research is simply outstanding. She captures the scope of Mondavi's story, which amounts to King Lear in wine country." W. BLAKE GRAY, Vinography

Larry Light and his bride, Meredith Anthony, proved versatile in fiction. "Ladykiller is an intriguing, compelling and suspenseful crime novel packed with enticing twists and turns to keep you on the edge. The authors have created a powerful thriller that tantalizes with a sense of suspense and a steady flow of action. The characters are believable, finely developed and engaging. Ladykiller is superbly crafted with vivid detail that draws you into the story." TERRY SOUTH, Quality Reviews

2006

Larry Light addressed timeless topics. "Light brings back intrepid reporter Karen Glick, feature writer for Profit magazine, for a second outing (following Too Rich to Live) with largely satisfying results. The three Reiner sisters, Linda, Ginny and Flo, have created a computer program called Goldring that accurately predicts the stock market, and have used it to make themselves incredibly wealthy. But the digital goose that lays the golden eggs proves deadly.... Light is skillful setting the multiple and complicated plots spinning, and despite the body count he manages to keep the tone light and quick; however, the story—nicely tied up though it is—relies heavily on coincidence and overly talky characters, and much of the supporting cast feel stock. That said, Glick remains a strong, witty heroine; her latest adventure should please fans of Wall Street thrillers." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Giles Blunt chilled 'em with this. "Set in remote Algonquin Bay, Ontario, Blunt's compelling fourth crime novel to feature John Cardinal (after Blackfly Season) finds the police detective mourning the death of his wife, an apparent suicide. Then Cardinal starts receiving cold, hate-filled notes gloating over his loss.... An unexpected yet utterly realistic twist lifts this novel into extremely interesting (and entertaining) territory. Sharp dialogue, complex characters and a satisfying conclusion should help Blunt, who has won Britain's Silver Dagger and Canada's Arthur Ellis Award, win new readers in the U.S. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "The fourth crime novel featuring Detective John Cardinal may give acclaimed Canadian author Blunt the popular recognition he is due." ALLISON BLOCK, Booklist

Steve Hamm rode the tiger. "Business Week senior writer Hamm, who has focused on the emergence of India and China as global economic powers, chose to profile Wipro to tell the story of India's rising technology industry. Founder Azim Premji built the company from a failing vegetable oil company into a high-tech engineering lab serving clients such as Aviva and Texas Instruments. Premji (who has been called the Bill Gates of India) pioneered the "Wipro Way," which, much like the famed HP Way, emphasizes ethical values, process excellence, and a central focus on customer relations. On track to become the Wal-Mart of IT services, Wipro is already a fierce global competitor and will be a company to keep an eye on. DAVID SIEGFRIED, Booklist

Gary Weiss found the fraudsters -- again. "Never mind Enron—corruption, fraud and towering incompetence are Wall Street's daily bread and butter, insists this lively j'accuse. Ex-BusinessWeek reporter Weiss (Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street) details the myriad ways the financial industry preys on small investors... He also pillories the industry's toothless watchdogs—the New York Stock Exchange, a business media addicted to hype and puffery, and a do-nothing Securities and Exchange Commission." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "If you're like half of America, and you own stocks, either directly or through mutual funds, IRAs, or 401(k)s, you may not want to hear what Weiss has to say about the industry--but you'd better read it anyway, for your own good. Weiss, an award-winning investigative journalist, formerly with Business Week, refuses to toe the party line. He describes practices we thought were confined to the fringe dark side of The Street, such as boiler room fraud; overpaid, uncaring fund managers; ineffectual SEC regulations; and Wild West-style hedge funds. The wall that is supposed to separate CEOs, analysts, underwriters, and the media has long disappeared, according to Weiss, as these forces cozy up to form a coalition designed to separate you from your money." DAVID SIEGFRIED, Booklist

2005

Sandra Dallas struck a chord. "Old fans will recognize Dallas' trademark leisurely pace in a new setting, a gothic-tinted South instead of the wide-open Midwest, and be pleasantly surprised. The languid pacing will not keep readers from eagerly turning pages to discover why Amalia was murdered and the reasons behind Nora's failed marriage. Dallas has crafted a honey-and-Spanish-moss-tinged tale certain to please gentle fiction readers who don't mind a little mystery." KAITE MEDIATORE, Booklist

Giles Blunt stung. "Silver Dagger–winner Blunt spins a highly disturbing but truly memorable tale about a Canadian cult's murder spree.... Based on a true crime, the pulsing, tightly plotted narrative again shows why Blunt (Forty Words for Sorrow) should be considered among the new practitioners of crime drama's elite." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "His characters, even to the lonely guy sitting by himself at the end of the bar, are wonderfully realistic; his pacing never flags; his knowledge of police procedure is accurate without being show-offy; and he leaves the reader not so much with a story as with a glimpse into a perfectly realized world. First-rate." CONNIE FLETCHER, Booklist

Sheridan Prasso made a mark early with this effort. "Prasso's ambitious agenda focuses on both Asian women and our perceptions of them, exploring the historical and pop cultural roots of the 'Asian Mystique' and ending with a 'reality tour of Asia.' Her stories about the lives of Asian women from diverse cultures and socio-economic backgrounds are compelling." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "... Prasso explains the symbiotic nature of Western fantasy and Asian fulfillment--often to great profit--of that fantasy, the roles that Asian women play and defy in the West, even the dangerous implications of this still-active fantasy upon global politics. Especially interesting are her observations on the emasculated role of Asian men in Western media--picture, for instance, Jackie Chan even kissing a Western woman." ALAN MOORES, Booklist

Paul Raeburn shared some tough material. "Raeburn fully discloses the daily struggles he faces with his children -- one bipolar, the other chronically depressed -- but what emerges is less about them than about him. He is the center of the narrative -- a pragmatic journalist with an anger problem and a failed marriage who wants what's best for his children, but like most parents is groping in the dark for what that is.... Raeburn's greatest gift is his brave honesty. He challenges all parents to take responsibility and claim their part in their children's pain." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Larry Light took readers inside. "Light draws us into a Wall Street world full of well-chosen and telling details that only someone who's had inside access would know. TOO RICH TO LIVE melds humor and suspense in this entertaining mystery that explores the heady worlds of some very rich men from the point of view of one feisty investigative journalist."CARROLL JOHNSON, Reviewing the Evidence.

Private flaws, public failings -- Spitzer and Edwards

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 21:58:00 +0000

It was surreal watching CNN this past week, as former Presidential hopeful John Edwards was hit by a federal indictment in connection with his extramarital affair during the 2008 presidential campaign. The Edwards news was old hat. What was bizarre was watching a genuine expert in the realm, former N.Y. Gov.-turned-pundit, Eliot Spitzer, report on it all.

How rich can it get in the land of pols-turned-quasi-journos? Here was Edwards, a former U.S. Senator looking pathetic but still well-coiffed as he offered regrets but a denial of legal guilt. And there was Spitzer at his anchor desk for his prime-time showcase, “In The Arena,” recounting it all and soberly assessing the prosecutors’ chances. Here was one marital cheat talking to a national audience about the failings of another, while never mentioning his own perfidies, of course.

How can it be that national TV journalism has descended into a hall-of-mirrors world such as this? Where are Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw or Katie Couric when you need them? Even Lou Dobbs – whose former CNN show, with its dubious emphasis on point of view, seems to be Spitzer’s model – would have been better. At least, it would have been free of hypocrisy.

Don’t get me wrong about rehabilitation. I believe in second chances. And people do have a right to make a living, a right even to regain lost dignity. What’s more, Spitzer, unlike Edwards, was never indicted as a result of his secret dalliances. Spitzer in fact had the good sense to resign as governor in 2008, stepping out of that arena with an appropriate mea culpa and sequestering himself for a while as he presumably tried to get his hungers under control and keep his family together. He’s also a smart guy with some real experience that could be valuable – maybe outside of journalism.

But there remains something odd when one serial adulterer who plunged sullied from high public office sits at a gleaming high-tech news and commentary desk and opines about the misdoings of another. A viewer might have half-expected Spitzer to declaim, “well, back when I was stepping out on Silda, here’s how I stayed clear of prosecutors…”

As it was, Spitzer instead interviewed a former prosecutor-turned-journalist, CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin, about the prosecution’s risky case. That gave Spitzer a chance to hint, albeit briefly, that maybe prosecutors were abusing their discretion in pursuing the case (which has to do with the misuse of nearly $1 million in donated funds to conceal the affair). It would not have been out of place for Spitzer to compliment the enforcers who passed on pursuing him, even as he dallied with prostitutes first as New York’s attorney general and then as its governor.

One has to wonder what was going through Toobin’s mind. The guy, an author of much-praised books on the Supreme Court and other legal matters, is a professional journalist, not a pol. One imagines Toobin saying, “Well, Eliot, you’re right. The prosecutors who combed through the wiretaps in your case may have taken an unpopular stance in declining to charge you, but in legal terms ...”

Of course, nothing of the kind happened. Instead, it was as if the ex-Gov. was just another journalist, another honest purveyor of the craft bringing truth to the benighted millions. The sad part is that CNN has plenty of legitimate journos – Anderson Cooper sits atop a long list. But for reasons that one suspects have to do with ratings, it chooses to be the vehicle for Spitzer’s return to the limelight.

As for the pathetic l’affaire Edwards, the doings of the former North Carolina Senator, onetime Democratic vice-presidential nominee and two-time Presidential aspirant offer still more lessons for journalists. This aw-shucks pol with the boy-next-door good looks is a bona fide member of quite a club of the ethically challenged. Members -- some prosecuted, some not – include former governors, such as Spitzer, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, James McGreevy of New Jersey and Mark Sanford of South Carolina, as well as former Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, former President Bill Clinton, former Israeli President Moshe Katsav and current Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Each member’s tale is sordid in its own way and together they are interestingly nonpartisan. But the common denominator for all these disgraced leaders is the heady pursuit of sex, money or power – their outsize cravings for such things -- and the blurring of the lines between right and wrong that can come with that. For reporters, these folks, including Spitzer, are the embodiment of the idea that vigilance is mandatory. Of course, that idea goes for real reporters – the Cronkite and Couric type -- not the ersatz cable-host variety.

Do you remember when ...? Pitfalls of memory.

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Tue, 31 May 2011 01:07:00 +0000

A confession: I’m terrible with names. I can meet people at parties and forget their names in two sips of a gin and tonic. I’ve tried associating qualities with names: Sally is long and tall, Roxanne leaves a red light on, Bruce favors blue jeans and white T shirts. No luck. Faces are fine. Names, a problem.

I suspect I’m hardly alone in this. But, believe me, it’s not a good thing in a journalist. It’s no better in a teacher, who has to contend with as many as 50 new fresh-faced undergrads every semester. Making matters worse, half the kids sport the same long dark hair-dos and rarely wear anything but jeans.

So, it was interesting the other day when a group of us were talking about the tricks of memory. One fellow vividly recalls watching the Beatles debut on Ed Sullivan in a relative’s house, even remembering his position in the TV room. Problem is, his relatives didn’t live in that house at that time. Another friend mentioned how memories can’t be divorced from the words we use to describe them, so they’re shaped – perhaps distorted – by language. For my part, I fretted that I have few memories of my deceased parents’ faces, but instead recall photos of them.

It’s as if we don’t remember things first-hand. Incidents, people and places are all mediated through words or images. As Paul Simon might say, thank God for Kodachrome. It brings us those nice bright colors (or used to).

More peculiar, I think, is that many of us tend to recall bad things more easily than good or, at least, are affected more by nasty recollections. I have clear memories of slights or troubling childhood events and can summon up unpleasant images in a flash. It takes a bit of work to bring up the happy events.

Does this say something about one’s attitude toward life? Is a naturally happier person more likely to live in a world of upbeat memories? My friend, the Beatles fan, is a happy sort and has no trouble summoning up such a happy time, even if it didn’t quite happen that way. By contrast, does the dour person plague himself with bad recollections just to keep some dark guilt-inspired cloud hovering?

Perhaps we can blame the teachers, nuns, priests, rabbis, etc., who tortured us into profound feelings of guilt about our faults. They could take the tiny flaws in our character or behavior and grow them into gaping holes, making them loom large in person and in memory.

Certainly, personality seems to play a role in what we remember. I know several people who’ve grown up in the same houses with the same parents and yet seem to have had very different childhoods. Their recollections vary wildly, as the happy person bubbles over with cheery memories while the dour one only recalls the bleak moments.

As I chew over these things – oddly enough, on Memorial Day -- I’m looking at a group of photos my wife and younger daughter have gathered. They’ll be used in an upcoming bridal shower for our older daughter. In one picture, that blonde-haired blue-eyed beauty, not quite of walking age yet, looks intently at a camera, dandled on the knee of a grinning dad with a full head of hair. Can that possibly have happened? Why is that sublime moment, an ordinary one really, lost to time except for a photo?

In another photo, all three kids stand before a fence with the Statue of Liberty far off in the distance. My gosh, were they cute. The youngest, who just beamed at her college graduation, flashed a smile to die for some 17 years ago or so. And can that handsome little guy on the left possibly be a military officer today, all grown up and serving at the moment in a dangerous place?

Lately, I’ve been photographing lots of things, in part because I need to develop a better facility with multimedia techniques. Job requires it. But my younger daughter and I just got back from a trip to the Grand Canyon in which she got pretty irritated at the camera. Why ruin the experience, she asked? Why do we want to take pictures anyway? Why not just enjoy the moment?

These are fair questions. But, graybeard that I am now, I tried to explain how pictures are not for showing friends where you’ve gone – indeed, nobody really does that anymore. No, pictures are the ways we freeze time, which otherwise passes all too quickly. For a 22-year-old, the passage of time is inconsequential. For her father, it’s a different story.

Someday, she’ll dig through all those photos in our basement or troll through image banks on Facebook or its equivalent. She’ll laugh and weep at the memories they’ll conjure up. Will they be accurate memories? Probably not. But will they be true? In their own way, no doubt. Now, about those names, if anyone can recall some good tricks for keeping them in mind for just a semester or so …

Food prices rising. Blame Wall Street?

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Wed, 04 May 2011 16:26:00 +0000

Wonder why prices for food and other commodities are higher now than they were a decade ago? Forget the rise in population to nearly 7 billion souls. Disregard the astonishing expansion of economies in China and elsewhere. No, it’s the sinister folks at Goldman Sachs who have made wheat so costly.

We know this thanks to Foreign Policy, published by the Slate unit of the Washington Post Co. The revelation appeared April 27, under the headline “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis.” The subhed: “Don’t blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street’s at fault for the spiraling cost of food.”

I share this because I continue to be amazed at how those evil folks, speculators, keep popping up as piñatas for politicians, conspiracy theorists and the ill-informed. Even smart people believe this pap. Witness President Obama’s recent attack on speculators for boosting gas prices, a fresh assault that includes a federal investigation. Clearly, the appeal of a bogus idea can be irresistible.

In the FP piece, Frederick Kaufman argues that the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index lays at the center of a nasty web of big-money players who have cast farmers into near-irrelevancy. Even “bona fide” big players –- including corporations that buy and sell cereals for use –- have been sidelined by speculators, he tells us. The speculator –- who “neither produces nor consumes corn or soy or wheat,” and thus is evil by definition, has risen to be a menace, Kaufman suggests. Speculators now vastly outnumber the legit folks thanks to the GSCI and the popularity of investment products based on the index.

To market-watchers, these ideas may pluck familiar strings. Kaufman sang the tune in a July 2010 Harper's cover story, making few friends at Goldman. Steve Strongin, the firm's head of Global Investment Research, fired back at the time: "Long-term trends, including increased meat consumption by the growing middle class in the emerging markets and the increased use of biofuels in the developed markets, have created a backdrop for global food shortages and, as a result, millions are left desperately exposed to the vagaries of the weather for their survival. It is a shame that the plight of these millions appears to merit a cover story in your magazine only when it is exploited as a pretext to launch unsubstantiated attacks against the financial industry."

As his latest effort shows, however, Kaufman remains unbowed.

“Today, bankers and traders sit at the top of the food chain – the carnivores of the system, devouring everyone and everything below," writes Kaufman, an associate professor of English and Journalism who can turn a phrase well. “Near the bottom toils the farmer. For him, the rising price of grain should have been a windfall, but speculation has also created spikes in everything the farmer must buy to grow his grain – from seed to fertilizer to diesel fuel. At the very bottom lies the consumer.”

Further, he suggests, people across the world are starving thanks to this system. Some 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world’s “food insecure” to 1 billion, a number never seen before. This, it appears, is the fault of the speculative fury that followed creation of the GSCI in 1991 and, worse, deregulation of futures in 1999. Prices have soared thanks to the rush of money, including a lot of dumb money, in the markets.

Finally, the author argues that the evil geniuses at Goldman Sachs rigged the game by devising the index as a long-only product. “Every time the due date of a long-only commodity index futures contract neared, bankers were required to ‘roll’ their multi-billion dollar backlog of buy orders over into the next futures contract, two or three months down the line,” he says. Evidently, none could ever cash out their stakes, a notion that may surprise those who have done so.

Kaufman offers a few nuggets of data -- sort of -- to buttress his argument. Mainly, he zeroes in on 2008 when commodities were lofted in a short-lived bubble. Hard spring wheat, usually $4-$6 a bushel, topped $25 at one point, he says. And he notes that the worldwide price of food rose 80% from 2005 to 2008 and has kept rising, though he doesn’t say what is being measured as food or who is doing the measuring.

But all that is beside the point. Kaufman omits the inconvenient truth that in the last decade prices have fallen, as well as risen, in commodities and commodity-linked investments. The iShares S&P GSCI Commodity-Index Trust jumped from about $50 a share in July 2006 to above $76 in June 2008, but plunged below $23 by February 2009 before clawing its way back to about $40 now. The wheat he refers to now fetches about $9 a bushel at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, a far cry from $25. Long only or not, investors have made or lost money as prices roller-coastered. This escalator doesn’t have only an up button.

Certainly it’s possible that the surge of money into commodity-related products has made pricing more volatile. The growth of buyers and sellers in any market might do that. But, could they force an unbroken upward climb detached from basic supply and demand issues? That would ignore the global surge in demand for food and commodities. Moreover, it would be blind to drought, blight, excessive wetness at planting time and other weather-related factors -- some of which figured into the February 2008 surge in wheat prices. Blame the billions of hungry folks out there, not Wall Street’s thousands.

Of course, Kaufman’s logical flaws don’t end there. His fingering Goldman’s index as the root of evil, especially because of its long-only nature, is at best silly. Plenty of other vehicles for commodity investing beckon. “Just because you cannot short through this fund does not mean that you cannot short elsewhere nor that you cannot sell your shares once you think prices have peaked,” says Craig R. MacPhee, an economist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who specializes in global development and trade. “There may be speculative buying that drives up prices at least temporarily, but I doubt that the GSCI has anything to do with it.”

Goldman isn't taking Kaufman's broadside laying down. Managing director Lucas Van Praag in a May 3 rebuttal argues that the writer "does not present any credible evidence that commodity index investing is responsible for the rise in food prices. Serious inquires, such as one conducted by the OECD in the wake of the 2008 price spike, have concluded that 'index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices.' Rather than destabilizing futures markets, commodity index funds provide them with a stable pool of capital, improving farmers' ability to insure themselves against the risks inherent in agricultural prices. This, in turn, can allow farmers to produce more food at a lower cost."

And, by the way, Goldman has not owned its index since 2007, when S&P acquired it. Goldman's folks noted this in 2010 and reiterated it again in the rebuttal.

Regrettably, facts sometimes do get in the way of a good story. And suspicion of the futures markets may be inevitable. Farmers have cast a wary eye on Chicago sharpies for decades, resenting them for seemingly setting prices growers had to settle for. Never mind the underlying supply and demand curve or the combat among shorts and longs at the exchanges.

Today, most people don’t have a clue what goes on in these markets. Players who rely on opaque math and hunches are likely disinclined to share the secrets of their successes (or failures). And, yes, occasionally bad actors do try to game the markets. But if the folks at Goldman could pull off half the manipulation ill-informed writers suspect them of, they’d be a heck of lot richer than they already are and that’s saying something.

Gas prices and politics: an ugly blend

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:59:00 +0000

Electoral politics and rising gas prices are a combustible mix. But President Obama, disappointingly, is all too happy to use the $4-a-gallon-plus prices to his advantage by, again, demonizing players in the financial markets. Feeling pinched at the pump? It’s all the fault of those mysterious gnomes at the New York Mercantile Exchange who gamble on price moves.

Forget the plunging dollar, Middle Eastern tumult and fiscal deadlock in Washington. The president would instead pillory the sharpies in the oddly colored jackets at NYMEX. That’s why he created a financial fraud enforcement working group to look into "the role of traders and speculators.” Guided by Attorney General Eric Holder, Cabinet department officials, federal regulators and the National Association of Attorneys General will unleash their wrath on those bad boys.

Even before the group puts a single trader under the hot lights, Obama has made it clear that he won’t stand for the supposed abuses and manipulation anymore. At a renewable energy plant in Reno, Nev., on April 21, the president declared, “we are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain.”

The line, ready made for a president disturbingly fond of using class warfare to rally his base, will play well with the faithful. And his probe, virtually guaranteed to go nowhere, will no doubt be popular among the ill-informed.

But the sad part is that this bright man should know better. Surely, this Chicagoan has been schooled by the folks at CME Group, owners of NYMEX. Leaders there, who have played host to him at times and even contributed to his campaigns, must have given him some insights into the workings of the futures world. Indeed, his former chief of staff, now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, served on the board at CME.

If Obama hasn’t asked for a tutorial, he should have. The president, a former teacher who often lapses into lecture mode, should then take what he learns and educate the American public. Gas prices, he could say, reflect a host of factors – including demand rising in a recovering economy – as well as the latest financial ineptitude in Washington.

As Chicago Sun-Times financial columnist and CME director Terry Savage has told CNN, the sinking dollar alone drives up prices of everything from gold to oil simply because such commodities are priced in dollars. Sure, people might try to game the prices, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist John Parsons told The Huffington Post. “But it wouldn’t be central to the price movement,” he added.

Yes, the president could tell the public, there are traders who do make money on price rises. Some also lose on rises. That’s the way the markets work.

If he really wanted to shed some light on gas prices, he should tell voters that traders are like the oil world’s pilot fish. Such brightly colored little fish hang around sharks and dine on parasites that pester the bigger host creatures. Do they manipulate, steer or direct the sharks? No. But some of them do profit by the relationship. And the sharks do well by it, too.

If the president believes the pabulum that he is offering up, though, he seems mesmerized by the fish. All those bright colors at the NYMEX have blinded him. And that’s troubling for a Harvard-educated University of Chicago classroom veteran who has a vast array of smart people in Washington at his disposal. Is there no one with the cojones to tell him how things work? Where is Austan Goolsbee, the Chicago business school economist who leads his Council of Economic Advisers?

Sadly, though, this is all too familiar. When gas prices climbed in 2006, President Bush acted much the same way as Obama. He ordered Justice and Energy department officials to probe price manipulation and speculation. He sent letters to state attorneys general urging them to move against “anticompetitive anticonsumer conduct in the petroleum industry.” The villain then was Big Oil.

Nobody from ExxonMobil or Shell went to jail as a result of the Bush folderol. It’s doubtful anyone will as a result of Obama’s efforts, which are being roundly slammed by economists. "This is a transparently political fishing expedition that insinuates that fraud or manipulation is distorting oil prices without providing even the flimsiest factual basis for such a suspicion," University of Houston finance professor Craig Pirrong told Fox News.

Like any arena where there is big money to be made, where uncertainty reigns and where transparency is rare, the oil markets are prey to skulduggery of all sorts. And there will be people who profit while others struggle. Those folks are more likely to be lucky than evil, though. Surely this president is smart enough to know the difference.

Driven to distraction in the academic world

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 04:05:00 +0000

Here are a few surprising things about life in the academy. Grading is nearly a fulltime job, distraction is the steady state of things, and knowing whether your students have learned anything is a lot easier than proving it.

On the first point, there’s never enough time during the work week to do a good job of grading and critiquing student work. Now I know why elementary-school teachers spend good chunks of their weekends cozying up to student papers.

It's a matter of adjusting your calendar. I’ve taken to giving my kids deadlines at 5 p.m. on Fridays. That way I figure I may get their work back to them in timely fashion. I'm not whining about this (though it taxes my wife's patience). But few folks outside the academy understand this. All they see are summers off and a few lectures a week. Would that it were only so!

Grading, by the way, may be the most challenging part of the job. In journalism instruction this amounts to editing a lot of stories every week. That means finding holes, looking for the great quotes, checking for the sound structure, the seductive lede, solid nut graf, good kicker, etc., even as you suggest -- but avoid dictating -- rewrites. By comparison, my editing buds at Bloomberg Businessweek work intensely on two or three pieces a week – including takeouts – which now sounds like a day at the beach.

Many of the papers, moreover, are the work of, um, loving little hands that have a long way to go. They’re novices and that’s why they’re in school. Our job is to be tough but encouraging, which is a challenging balancing act. I had to give a 22 to a piece the other day and offer a detailed criticism to explain the poor grade. But will that student come back with something better or shrug it off as a blown assignment? So far, on her first rewrite, she’s done mostly the latter. That led to me kicking the piece back to her and suggesting she take a closer look at all those margin notes I made. We’ll see how it turns out soon.

Taking a hard line with students isn't easy. Some of my colleagues make Marine drill sergeants look like pushovers. One started a basic reporting class this semester with a full classroom of students and is down to nine. The kids who couldn’t handle the tough grading washed out; they must hope they'll take the class again with someone they expect will go easier or they're just leaving journalism. Another colleague who has taught for a couple decades can count those he failed on one hand with several fingers to spare. The Gentleman’s C was a saving grace for many, I suspect.

I figure there’s got to be a middle-ground, a golden mean. Sure, most of our kids aren’t ready yet to handle the growling city editors and magazine section editors I ran across. And some never will be. But I figure part of my job is to make them ready for that. And I don’t have to be an SOB to get them ready for SOBs. I just have to point out the flaws in their work and grade them accordingly, showing them how to make fixes. They’ll learn whether journalism is for them even without a high washout rate, I figure.

Indeed, some of the work that the kids do can make your day. I live for those moments when a piece comes in that almost ready for prime time. One fellow this week did a story comparing drinking-related crime in Lincoln with other places, quoting the local police chief and making it all timely by talking about a recent expansion of the drinking day to 2 a.m., an hour more than before. Good stats, disturbing records of car accidents with booze involved. The piece is solid.

Other students have done pieces that surprise and delight. One looked into a Northwestern University study that showed that religious people tend toward obesity. She looked at local churches and how they’re trying to foster fitness among their members. Another student looked at a new gender gap, the imbalance between women and men in high school graduation rates and college attendance (57% girls on campus nationally and in Nebraska). Such intriguing efforts can make grading far more palatable, even on weekends.

Part of the reason there are not enough hours in the work week for the grade book is that every day is a laundry list of distractions. Some days, this is great. It reminds me of John Lennon’s line from "Beautiful Boy" that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. There are, for instance, the kids who walk in to talk about their schoolwork (a pause that refreshes because it’s fun to help them iron out assignments and ideas). Our policy at Nebraska’s J School is no set office hours, but an open door whenever we’re not in class. That can mean many surprise visits.

Then there’s email, that modern scourge. The damn computer delivers something else to deal with every few minutes, it seems. And each note requires a prompt response, of course. I do respond quickly to the dean’s notes, I must say. My wife and kids, too, get priority. For others, it’s a challenge.

It reminds me of a high school history teacher who taught us time-management long before Day-Timers made a bundle on the concept. Make a to-do list early in the week, update it often and hope you'll have checks next to most items by week’s end. Works pretty well, though mine seems to expand every day. I have found that I can’t abide unchecked items, which means a good many-mile run each morning to work off the self-imposed pressure. I hope my kids do something similar and figure the ones who meet deadlines must be doing so.

Finally, there’s another area of academics that is a real challenge. It’s the proof of success. “Assessment,” a term of little endearment, isn’t easy.

Let me spell that out. Take my biz-econ journalism students, for instance. I know they are learning something. They knew nothing about publicly traded companies, earnings, Form 10Ks and 10Qs, etc. They couldn’t write about a company’s quarterly results before spending a couple weeks on the topic (indeed, developing a grasp of income statements, balance sheets, stock market performances, etc.) Hell, they didn’t know the difference between Nasdaq and the NYSE, or the many different animals in the stock and commodities exchange worlds, before we dealt with all that. It’s clear they’ve learned something.

But how much did they learn? What will they take away? How can I prove to outsiders, especially tenure-review committee members, that the kids have moved from Point A to Point B? Even defining those points, as well as measuring the gap between them, is a challenge. Lots of documents. Lots of rubrics and graphs.

Fortunately, at Nebraska some of us have help. A group of us – mostly tenure-track newbies – are working on a peer-teaching experience this semester that is aimed at getting at such answers. We met on Saturday this weekend (no time during the work week for such things) to draft a preliminary version of a statement aimed at measuring our progress.

I picked three students – one star, one middler and one challenged student. I monitor their progress via reporting and writing assignments and tests. Will it become clear that these kids have grown between January and May? Don’t know. Certainly, they’ve learned something, but quantifying and demonstrating their achievement isn’t as simple as recording how they’ve done on an end-of-term test – it doesn’t work that way in journalism or other writing fields.

For folks in the teaching game for most of their careers, a lot of this is workaday stuff. It’s routine. For me, it’s all new. I’d like to think I’m doing A work. But between the grading challenges, the many distractions and the challenge of measuring it all, it’s damn hard to prove that. There are many days when it makes running a national correspondent system for a magazine look easy.

Face of the new journalism

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:05:00 +0000

Business reporter John Rebchook’s face is worth studying. It may be the face of the new journalism – or at least one of them.

Let’s get to know him a bit. Some 30 years ago, John cut his teeth in journalism at the El Paso Herald-Post. While there he wrote a lede that proved memorable enough to be included in Mel Mencher’s Reporting and Writing textbook, one a lot of us grew up on. The lede went like this:

In less than three miles, Joseph L. Jody III ran six stop signs, changed lanes improperly four times, ran one red light, and drove 60 mph in a 30 mph zone all without a driver's license. Two days later, he again drove without a driver's license.
This time he ran a stop sign and drove 80 mph in a 45 mph zone. For his 16 moving violations Jody was fined $1,795.
He never paid. Police say that Jody has moved to Houston. Of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 outstanding traffic warrants in police files, Jody owes the largest single amount.
Still, Jody's fines account for a small part of at least $500,000 owed to the city in unpaid traffic warrants.
In February, Mayor Jonathan Rogers began a crackdown on scofflaws in order to retrieve some $838,000 in unpaid warrants. As of mid March, some $368,465 had been paid.

Clever, eh? It’s a classic example of the delayed lede, one that teases the reader a bit before getting to the point, or nut graf, of the story. Today, however, I suspect that such a lede would suffer a swift death in an editor’s keyboard. Even John, in his new life as a Web journalist, would likely spike it as ill-suited to our impatient, get-to-the-point times.

Nowadays, John’s prose goes more like this:

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers announced today that his office has filed a lawsuit against Western Sky Financial, a South Dakota-based online lender, and its principal, Martin A. Webb, for making unlicensed, high-interest loans to Colorado consumers.
According to the lawsuit, filed in Denver District Court, the company made more than 200 loans to Colorado consumers since at least March 2010, during which time it was not licensed with the state. The loans to ranged in value from $400 to $2,600 and had terms ranging from seven months to 36 months. The loans’ annual percentage rates ranged from 140 percent to 300 percent.

John’s reporting today can’t dally or tease. He gets to the point in part because he’s not writing for a newspaper any longer, but rather for his own blog, the pleasantly green-logoed Inside Real Estate News: Colorado’s Real Estate News Source.

John’s readers, like Net readers generally, have little patience for cleverness or meandering. They want the news at the top, so they can move on quickly if it doesn’t grab them. They don’t graze languidly, but rather rush to pull out the news that is relevant to their business. They take what they need and dash off to the next meeting.

John, who worked at the Rocky Mountain News for some 26 years until it folded in 2009, is an example of a new kind of journalist. It’s not just his prose that makes him interesting. It’s his business.

When the Rocky died, John took his expertise as the paper’s longtime real estate editor and created his Net product. It’s a vehicle for and about players and projects in the real estate industry in Colorado. He has a few sponsors who pay for ads on his site and, he says, help him make a living (albeit not quite as cushy a living as when he was a veteran editor at the Rocky.)

As Inside Real Estate News grows, however, John expects that the returns will grow, too. He’s so confident in it that he recently turned down a job at a local weekly in Denver. He likes being his own boss, he says.

Lots of journalists may wind up running their own shows in coming years. Online reading is surging as traditional print newspapers struggle. And the fate of outfits such as The Huffington Post, recently sold to AOL for $315 million, suggest that the appetite for well-devised Web products is hefty. (John, would you settle for 1/315th of that?)

Of course, would-be Web journalists do have to bear a few things in mind, and John’s experience underscores them. First, he offers content that is in high demand, at least in certain circles. Much of what he does is specialized and it isn’t commodity news readily available in lots of other places. What’s more, he works fast, getting his news out ahead of the pack.

Finally, John is able to handle the business side of his operation, taking time to market his services to advertisers even as he stays on top of the news. He stays on top of the growth of the Net, too, putting out the word about his blog on Facebook.

John’s grinning punim isn’t the only look of journalism in the future. TV, magazines, and other vehicles will likely have a place, alongside some newspapers – on the Web or not. But take a close look at him anyway. Whether in textbooks or on the Net, he has plenty to teach us.

Life and work can take some stunning turns

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 13:50:00 +0000

Career choices used to be simple. Go to school to be, say, a doctor, lawyer or reporter. Get your degree, apprentice as an intern, an associate or a budding Jimmy Olsen, and then ply your trade. In medicine or law you would make a lot of money and learn golf for when you retired at 55. But for growing numbers of us life rarely moves from point A to B anymore. Instead, we follow a long and winding road with some fascinating forks.

Consider Lynde McCormick, a colleague at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver in the 1980s. While working as a business reporter, Lynde wielded a deft touch with words. He had a sharp eye for big, broad stories and wrote weekly takeouts for a supplement we called Business Tuesday, doing packages the rest of us all wanted to do. Later, he rose to business editor, where -- among other things -- he waged war on adverbs. If it ended in an "ly," he'd say, kill it. A Californian, he also had a weakness for fast cars and from time to time turned his hand to new car reviews.

Lynde's career has taken some stunning turns since then. He left the Rocky for the bright lights at a TV channel the Christian Science Monitor experimented with and then joined Monitor Radio. An adventurer, he landed a job with CNBC in Hong Kong, a spot he loved. When CNBC pulled the plug in '96 on its Hong Kong operation and merged with Dow Jones TV in Singapore, Lynde says, he moved back to Boston to serve as business editor at the Monitor's newspaper. Meantime, his equally adventurous wife, Andrea, started a company that imported Chinese antique furniture.

Then things got interesting. After a couple of years, he joined her business. The pair drove around the country, towing a trailer and doing antiques shows, as many as three each month. Eight years ago, they opened a gallery in Manhattan, The Han Horse on Lexington Avenue, to market furniture from the late Qing Dynasty (1700-1900) and pottery artifacts from as long ago as 206 BC. They continue to run it, even though the antiques business has been a tough go in recent years.

By something of a back door, the McCormicks also got into the restaurant business. They backed a friend who opened a spot in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn and wound up running it when he ran into personal problems. The Brooklyn Label serves espresso drinks that Lynde says are "amazingly good." It's gotten some good notices from, for instance, New York Magazine.

As his career has unfolded, Lynde's reporting skills have come in handy. "I have constantly tried to gather as much information as possible, going to expert sources, listening to what they had to say, and then using the parts that made sense for our restaurant," he says. "It's a lot like writing a story - you gather the best information possible and then use your own judgment and intelligence to figure out how to use it."

He also has developed a good sense of marketing and customer service -- which might be helpful for journalists. "With both businesses, our philosophy has been that when someone walks through the door, the goal is not to sell them something but to make them want to come back," Lynde says. "The result is that people, generally, like us... which has a lot to do with why we are still in business."

Today, the Rocky is no more, a victim of the Internet and the great newspaper consolidation wave. The Monitor serves up its news coverage mostly online, a route many news outfits may wind up taking. And CNBC soldiers on. But the skills Lynde mastered at such places are helping him in ways he likely never imagined. I expect he has few regrets for the time he spent learning them.

For many journalists and journalism students, the road won't be straight. But the views can make it damn interesting.

Campus papers spur careers -- in lots of things

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:09:00 +0000

Some 38 years ago, Jim Vallely was a New Jersey college student who had a knack for humor and a nice touch with a pen, but he wasn’t sure how to put the two together. Nourishing what he recalls as “a very faint ambition” to become a writer, he’d hang about the school newspaper office. Once, we published a piece he did called “Suicide note from a dog.”

Sadly, the piece seems lost to history. That’s sad because Jim, left in the photo, today is a prolific comedy writer in L.A. His credits are stunning: writer and co-executive producer of Emmy Award-winning Arrested Development, exec producer on Running Wilde, consulting producer on ‘Til Death, as well as various producing spots on The Geena Davis Show, The John Larroquette Show and The Golden Girls.

Jim is a big deal in the world of writing and production.

And this weekend he sent me a touching note crediting the launch of his stellar career to our paper and the piece about the dog. “I was published!, and I decided then and there to pursue comedy writing,” he wrote.

School newspapers can make a huge difference in people’s lives. That’s obvious for future journalists – as employers tell us when they’re considering intern candidates. Outfits ranging from local papers to the likes of Bloomberg put such experience at the top of their list. They want to see the clips. They know there’s nothing like getting out, covering things and having to put your work out – on deadline and with an editor’s oversight -- for the world to see.

But school papers also matter whether journalism is in your future or not. Writing, editing, getting a platform for commenting on the world is invaluable for anyone who plans to do anything involving pecking at a keyboard. It teaches you how to look carefully, think critically, organize your thoughts and subject them to the cut and thrust of public debate. Such skills are central to law, politics, teaching, business – really just about anything professional. It’s just also a hell of a lot of fun.

Jim went on to do standup work in New York in the 1980s. That, I'm sure, was his crucible. He honed his craft in a lot of tough rooms. He then found his way to L.A., where he’s been writing for TV for the last 25 years.

Thanks to the wonder of the Net, he tracked me down and wrote to remember our time as fresh-faced undergrads. We had spent a lot of time talking about writing, wondering where our dreams would lead us. He recalls my urging him to specialize in something. “I asked you, ‘you mean, like humor …’ and you said yes,” Jim wrote. Thus, the dog piece.

Jim went on to specialize – in spades. He figured out what fit him and pursued it, despite, I’m sure, huge challenges. His gambles and his stick-to-it-iveness paid off.

But a school newspaper did mark a big turning point in the road for him. Students who don’t make room in their crowded college lives for it may never know what opportunities they are giving up. Think about that the next time you see a hilarious, award-winning show. Look, too, for Jim Vallely’s credit.

Corporate culture, BusinessWeek and odd dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 19:42:00 +0000

Corporate culture may be like pornography. Defining it is tough, but you know it when you see it.

It has rules, ways for people to behave toward one another and the outside world. It has a purpose, perhaps helping a group of people to rally around the company mission. It has history and, indeed, is the legacy of people who’ve created it and pass it on to newcomers. In the end, it’s a means for preserving the tribe and indoctrinating the young.

Corporate culture is also perishable. It can be damaged or destroyed by new managements. Or it can be used by them to help organizations move on and adapt to changing times.

Take BusinessWeek, my employer of 22 years. It was a place whose culture so infused many of us that at times we felt like our first names were “BusinessWeek reporter.” Many of us came to identify so closely with BW that it changed our worldviews. We looked at business, even at life, in different ways, thanks to the values we absorbed, the way we worked and the things we learned at the feet of our elders.

Even now, as I teach journalism students, I share the values I learned at BW. “No story is ever 100% positive or 100% negative,” I tell them, echoing a mantra I learned from a Corporation department editor. Magazine stories are all about point of view, which is what makes them different from most newspaper accounts, I say, echoing longtime editor Steve Shepard. As you take a stance, he’d add, you must give room to dissenting views, even if minimizing them. There’s no such thing as objectivity; there’s only fairness. And -- something I learned from my first BW boss, Todd Mason -- when at press conferences, keep your mouth shut and ask your questions of sources privately (why share your ideas with rivals?). Finally, you must be analytical, since you’re not being paid to be a stenographer.

There’s much more, of course. I use a guide to writing that longtime correspondent Stewart Toy put together to teach students how to write. It’s wonderful for teaching about anecdotal ledes, nut grafs, developing a theme and balancing it with skepticism, and employing the art of the kicker. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had when in college and grad school so many eons ago. And it reflects some of the corporate culture BW developed over the decades since its founding in 1929.

Bloomberg Businessweek, as it is now called, is a very different place now than when I left 18 months ago. Since then, Bloomberg bought the book, installed new management, changed much of the staff and set up a system in which its 2,300-reporter global network feeds content into the magazine. That’s one heckuva of larger and more potent reporting base that we could have ever hoped to tap, even with a bureau system that boasted some top talent around the world.

Bloomberg has also infused the outfit with its culture. It has brought to bear a sense of egalitarianism, for instance, in which private offices don’t exist and people work cheek by jowl in rows of modest desks in the New York headquarters. Editor Josh Tyrangiel’s desk seems to boast just one perk, proximity to a window, but many others in the organization have the same perk. This culture is well-described in a recent issue of American Journalism Review by Jodi Enda, who coincidentally is a former colleague from a prior employer.

I’m reminded of all this because of an odd dream that awoke me before dawn today. A longtime staffer at BW had died in the dream and another staffer wanted to pay tribute to her. I wound up contacting Keith Felcyn, the longtime chief of correspondents for BW who had hired me, and we talked about how to make this happen. A podcast maybe, I thought. We didn’t use that term, of course, since podcasts didn’t exist when Keith reigned.

Odd as it was, the dream left me feeling warm and fuzzy. I suppose everyone who has left a cherished outfit may feel the same at times. “Back in my day …” and all that.

Nostalgia is only part of the reason former BW staffers stay in touch. There’s an annual reunion (which, sadly, I’ve been unable to attend because of school obligations). There’s a Web site through Linked In. And ex-BW folks -- at outfits such as Reuters, Yahoo!, McKinsey, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or teaching at various universities -- often are in contact. Colleagues such as Chris Roush at UNC and SMU’s Mark Vamos have been invaluable to me as I learn the ropes in teaching. And just next week, Lauren Young of Reuters will graciously speak to a class at Nebraska. Peter Coy and Ron Grover, both still on staff at the book, have similarly done so.

Some of us bump into one another, unexpectedly at times. A few months ago, Rick Dunham of Hearst, Jane Sasseen of Yahoo! and Frank Comes of McKinsey were among several BW vets who wound up joining another veteran, Joyce Barnathan, at a dinner in D.C. for her organization, the International Center for Journalists. The ICFJ sent one of our former BW colleagues, Bob Dowling, to teach in China for a couple years. I’ll be going there under its auspices in the fall.

As I shared a drink with my buds at the D.C. gathering, it was hard to avoid getting choked up and mourning the passing of the culture that had brought us all together – and changed many of us. I suppose such sentimentality underlays my dream about the passing of former colleagues. The place mattered a lot to us all.

Today, networking and helping one another along is part of the reason for maintaining ties, of course. Some of my students will be joining my former colleagues as interns and I hope many more will over time.

But we also keep the lines intact because we have a lot in common. Like Marines or others who live and work in insular or idiosyncratic outfits, we know the rules -- at least as they used to be. We were part of something special, a place where talent and mutual respect were held high, and we know what to expect of one another. What’s more, thanks in part to how BW shaped us, a lot of us just like one another. A healthy corporate culture can make that happen.

Pistol-packing teachers: we'll learn 'em up right out here in Nebraska

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:24:00 +0000

When a Nebraska state legislator introduced a bill the other day that would open the way for teachers and administrators in schools in the state, including universities, to carry concealed guns, I’m not sure he fully appreciated how visionary the measure really was. It is, without doubt, one of the most far-sighted, politically astute and economically savvy pieces of legislation ever to be floated in Lincoln, Neb.

This bill, sure to be resisted by those blinkered pantywaists in Omaha and the university community in Lincoln, could transform the state’s economy and put Nebraska on the global map. It ought to be cheered from the Iowa border to Colorado. Let’s examine the implications.

First, school districts and the university are straining under budget pressures these days. If teachers and administrators could tuck Glocks under their vests, legions of security guards could be let go. Indeed, the campus police force at UNL and every other university campus in the state could be disbanded. When every academic is packing, criminals are sure to stay out of the classrooms, dormitories and poorly lit passageways traversed by coeds late at night. Think of the massive and instantaneous budget impact. Billion-dollar state budget shortfall? Gone in a flash of gunpowder!

Consider, too, the intellectual and financial benefits. If freshly armed professors chose to settle their disputes like men, instead of in those insufferably genteel discussions at faculty meetings, we’d have a lot fewer faculty members after a while. Odds are, too, that the survivors would be the brainier right-thinking types. Many of the rest are probably tenured, so this move would deal with that problem nicely, too. We’d save a bundle on inflated salaries and wind up with quick-thinking profs who have their heads on screwed on properly.

Sure, there could be some minor problems. Teachers drawing down on one another outside crowded classrooms or in faculty dining areas might be a bit disruptive, at times messy. But students adapt to just about anything and we do have janitors for a reason. Let’s not let such small issues hobble us.

Politically, moreover, this is a brilliant move. A bill like this forces legislators to put their convictions out on display for everyone to see. Not sure if your legislator is a Second Amendment champion? This’ll out him. And this way, we could rid ourselves of the overeducated urbanites who hide behind those wrong-headed complaints about gun violence and crime. You know, many of them are following secret agendas inspired by Moscow and Beijing to disarm Americans anyway. This bill will eventually force them out as voters see their true colors.

The measure is also an economic stroke of genius. When Nebraska becomes a place where real Americans can stride around with holsters heavy and hearts full, more Americans will want to visit. Eventually, many will move here. Our kind of people will desert those decadent and dangerous cities on the coasts and flock to the rolling prairie, where they can fire at will at anything that disturbs them. Our population will swell, first with tourists and then with permanent newcomers.

Don’t underestimate those tourists, either. This is Nebraska, after all – a place where six-shooters on both hips were once commonplace. With no trouble at all, we could recreate the glory days of the Nebraska Territory. People would wander the streets even in places like Lincoln looking for low-down varmints to eradicate. Our bars could reinstall those nifty swinging panels on their front doors. Men could play poker, curse, drink and spit a lot while busty women saunter around in fluffy skirts. Think of the possibilities of evoking a time when real freedom existed in the state and our country, when we didn’t rely on slick lawyers and worry about Miranda Rights and such.

What, you say, this is supposed to be the 21st Century? Gunfights have gone the way of player pianos. Now, we have laws and police and courts and such. Poppycock. It’s weaponry we all need. The bad guys are packing, after all, and the only way for decent folk to counter that is to carry even bigger guns. Let’s hope our legislators don’t stop at concealed handguns, but let us have assault weapons in our elementary, high schools and colleges. With any luck, someone clever on campus could develop a concealable bazooka – why are we paying those academics anyway, if not to come up with nifty new things? Indeed, Nebraska could become a Silicon Valley for weapons-makers.

But, really, what we should hope for is the ability to drive tanks to campus. Legalize armored personnel carriers and you’ll really scare off the bad element. They would also guarantee all of us right-thinking folks good parking spaces.

This bill, put forward in the wake of a tragic high school shooting by a mentally troubled student, is certainly evidence that some legislative leaders in the state have been bred and reared right – isn’t it? Then again, it could be a sign of maybe a little too much inbreeding in somebody’s family.

Making biz journalism sexy (well, almost)

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:49:00 +0000

Looking for ways to make business journalism come alive for students? How about creating scavenger hunts for juicy tidbits in corporate government filings? What about mock press conferences that play PR and journalism students against one another? Then there are some sure bets – awarding $50 gift cards to local bars for mock stock-portfolio performances and showing students how to find the homes and salaries of university officials and other professors – including yourself -- on the Net.

These were among the ideas savvy veteran instructors offered at the Business Journalism Professors Seminar last week at Arizona State University. The program, offered by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, brought together as fellows 15 profs from such universities as Columbia, Kansas State, Duquesne and Troy, as well as a couple schools in Beijing, the Central University of Finance & Economics and the University of International Business and Economics. I was privileged to be among those talented folks for the week.

We bandied about ideas for getting 20-year-olds (as well as fellow faculty and deans) excited about business journalism in the first place. The main answer was, of course, jobs. If they’d like good careers in journalism that pay well, offer lots of room to grow and that can be as challenging at age 45 as at 20, there really are few spots in the field to match. These days, with so much contraction in the field, business and economic coverage is one of the few bright spots, with opportunity rich at places such as Reuters, Bloomberg News, Dow Jones and the many Net places popping up.

The key, of course, is to persuade kids crazy for sports and entertainment that biz-econ coverage can be fun. The challenge is that many of them likely have never picked up the Wall Street Journal or done more than pass over the local rag’s biz page. The best counsel, offered by folks such as UNC Prof. Chris Roush, Ohio University’s Mark W. Tatge, Washington & Lee’s Pamela K. Luecke and Reynolds Center president Andrew Leckey, was to make the classes engaging, involve students through smart classroom techniques and thus build a following. Some folks, such as the University of Kansas’ James K. Gentry, even suggest sneaking economics and (shudder) math in by building in novel exercises with balance sheets and income statements.

Once you have the kids, these folks offered some cool ideas for keeping their interest:

-- discuss stories on people the students can relate to, such as the recent Time cover on Mark Zuckerberg or the May 2003 piece in Fortune on Sheryl Crow and Steve Jobs, and make sure to flash them on the screen (at the risk of offending the more conservative kids, I might add the seminude photo BW ran of Richard Branson in 1998)

-- scavenger hunts. Find nuggets of intriguing stuff in 10Ks or quarterly filings by local companies or familiar outfits such as Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Buffalo Wild Wings, Hot Topic, The Buckle, Kellogg, etc., and craft a quiz of 20 or so questions to which the students must find the answers

-- run contests in class to see who can guess a forthcoming unemployment rate, corporate quarterly EPS figure or inflation rate

-- compare a local CEO’s pay with that of university professors, presidents or coaches, using proxy statements and Guidestar filings to find figures

-- conduct field trips to local brokerage firm offices, businesses or, if possible, Fed facilities

-- have student invest in mock stock portfolios and present a valuable prize at the end, such as a gift certificate or a subscription to The Economist (a bar gift card might be a bit more exciting to undergrads, I’d wager)

-- follow economists’ blogs, such as Marginal Revolution and Economists Do It With Models, and get discussions going about opposing viewpoints

-- turn students onto sites such as businessjournalism.org, Talking Biz News, and the College Business Journalism Consortium

-- have students interview regular working people about their lives on the job

-- discuss ethical problems that concern business reporters, using transgressors such as R. Foster Winans as examples. Other topics for ethical discussions might include questions about taking a thank-you bouquet of flowers from a CEO or traveling on company-paid trips, as well dating sources or questions about who pays for lunch

-- discuss business journalism celebs, such as Lou Dobbs and Dan Dorfman

-- discuss scandals such as the Chiquita International scandal (Cincinnati Enquirer paid $10 m and fired a reporter after he used stolen voicemails)

-- use films such as “The Insider,” “Wall Street,” and “Social Network” to discuss business issues

-- use short clips from various films to foster discussions of how businesses operate. Good example: “The Corporation”
-- team up with PR instructors to stage a mock news conference competition pitting company execs in a crisis against journalism students. Great opportunity for both sides to strut their stuff.

We also heard some very helpful suggestions from employers, particularly Jodi Schneider of Bloomberg News and Ilana Lowery of the Phoenix Business Journal, along with handy ideas from Leckey and Reynolds executive director Linda Austin, a former business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. My biggest takeaway: run some mock job interviews with students and teach them to send handwritten thank-you notes.

And we were treated to some smart presentations by journalists Diana B. Henriques of the New York Times about the art of investigative work (look for her new Madoff book), the University of Nevada’s Alan Deutschman about the peculiar psychologies of CEOs (narcissists and psychopaths are not uncommon), the University of Missouri’s Randall Smith’s view of the future for business journalists (it’s raining everywhere but less on business areas). We got some fresh takes on computer-aided reporting, too, by Steve Doig of the ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication as well as on social media by the Reynolds Center's Robin J. Phillips..

For anyone interested in journalism, especially biz journalism, it was a great week. As I take the lessons from ASU to heart, my students will be better off. My thanks to the folks there.

Love Me Tender -- Elvis' Time in the Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 21:19:00 +0000

Elvis Presley’s road toward iconhood began at age 18 and ended at 42. Hard to believe that in just 24 years – the blink of an eye, or curl of a lip – this poor southern boy with a guitar changed cultural history and then vanished. It’s also a troubling reminder of how little time we all have to make our marks, however big or small.

This pop-culture reminder of mortality struck home for me as several of us visited Graceland last week after running in the Memphis marathon and half-marathon. For devotees, of course, the place is a shrine and the spot where the King is buried along with his parents and grandmother. Visitors drop little stuffed animals on the graves and scrawl messages on the low stone wall lining the front of the property.

Even though I’m less a Presley fan and more a Dylan, Lennon, Springsteen sort of guy, the visit offered some unsettling truths.

First, some background: Graceland, a doctor’s house not far from downtown Memphis that Presley bought at age 22, is surprisingly modest. Aside from the white-fenced grounds out back where he had horses and a big carport for his car collection, the main house is not much larger than an upper-middle-class home in just about any comfortable suburb. When we were house-hunting, Donna and I checked out houses in Lincoln, Neb., that were more impressive.

But for Presley and his wife and lone daughter, as well as his parents, it was home. Even as he roamed around North America making his name – in Hollywood, Vegas, etc. – he would return to the stone Colonial to hang out with his family and boyhood chums. He even recorded in the Jungle Room, a place done up like a lodge you’d see on safari. Graceland was, one would guess, a palace to a kid who began life in a shotgun shack. He even carpeted ceilings in some rooms, a foretaste of the kitsch that sadly dominates Elvis’s legacy.

For all the crassness around his memory, he was a Colossus in pop culture. Today, a couple outbuildings near the house are packed with gold, silver and platinum record plaques commemorating an astonishing list of hits. A room in one two-story building is lined floor-to-ceiling with them. Elvis was remarkably prolific and hardworking, something belied by his easygoing stage persona or the goofy movie characters he played. He starred in 31 movies – hard to believe, especially since all are forgettable – and he was, we heard, quite insecure about returning to live performances after nearly a decade of Tinseltown.

One of the taped interviews that visitors listen to as they roam around Graceland is revealing, even profound. When he decided to make a record, Presley says, he would pick songs that he believed people would want to hear – not what he wanted to sing, necessarily, but rather what he figured the public would like.

That may seem obvious for someone who wants to sell records or anything really. Anyone with customers knows you need to please them to sell more stuff, right? On the other hand, for artists or other creative people, serving an audience is usually the furthest thing from their minds. They want to give voice to their inner thoughts, to express themselves, perhaps to purge their demons. They want to share their brilliance or their pain. But they aren’t about meeting customer tastes.

Presley was different. His genius was in entertaining. Especially in his grotesque Vegas phase, he was trying to please and pack the house. He didn’t write his material. But he did sing it, of course, with power and panache. He was fun to listen to, and in business terms he knew his market and served it well.

But he also, in his early days, broke the mold. He created the market. He brought a unique style, a personality and an approach that departed from what had gone before. He made Sinatra and such look impossibly passé. He was one of a kind who hit at just the right time for a postwar generation looking to define itself as different and new. With some overstatement, Abbie Hoffman argued that Elvis marked the beginning of a revolution in America. Certainly, his loose hips, sultry voice and swagger – tempered by a nice-guy demeanor – worked for the 1950s set and for many beyond that. He paved the way for my later musical heroes.

That sort of originality is what it takes for anyone to make a deep mark – whether in novels, music, nonfiction, journalism or teaching. Few get to stride the world stage like Elvis, though every kid who plays at being a rock star is knowingly or unknowingly imitating the King. Few have millions paying attention to their writings or their artwork. But even those who reach even modest levels of fame – superstars or just people known for being good researchers, lawyers, doctors, etc. – must bring something fresh to the party. That was lesson number one for me from Graceland.

More troubling for me at age 56 is lesson number two: the preciousness of time. They’re not making more of it, and none of us has enough. For my money, Elvis made his rep for a few years in the ‘50s and fed off that for the rest of his surprisingly short career. A blazing comet when he was young, he was long gone culturally by the time he actually died, at Graceland, in 1977. Similarly, the Beatles did their pathbreaking work for really just a few years in the 1960s. Going to a Dylan concert this past summer was a bit like visiting a museum, and an odd one at that.

The time in the sun is distressingly short for us all, and if you don’t figure out early on how you’ll shine, you may never do so. Remember Tom Lehrer’s wonderful and sad line: “It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.”

There will never be another Elvis. All the kitschy crap – bobblehead dolls and Mr. Potato Head Elvises – that is peddled pathetically across the street from his former home will become a memory. Maybe it’ll take a decade, maybe longer, but a time will come when no one goes to Graceland anymore. The marketers still raking in a bundle on him will find other things to sell.

For now, though, Mr. Presley remains a handy case study in freshness, good timing and the chance we all have to make our mark while we may. This year would have marked Elvis’ 75th birthday. It’s grand that we have the 20-something version to remember.

There, there, dear: tears in the schoolroom

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 21:46:00 +0000

In “A League of Their Own,” that wonderful 1992 film, a young woman player makes a dunderheaded toss and breaks into tears as coach Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) yells at her. “Are you crying?,” he asks, stunned. “There’s no crying! There’s no crying in baseball!”

Boy, can I feel for Dugan. So far, I've had to deal with four incidents of tears in school. One time, I believe, the bad toss was mine. In the other cases, well, I’d point to hormones, undergrads facing job-like pressure for the first time or sheltered young women beginning to discover the world isn’t such a kindly place.

Still, I felt as flummoxed as Dugan did. Making girls cry is something only a true jerk would ever feel good about. This is so, even though a wiser colleague at Nebraska, veteran teacher and hard-boiled journalist Kathy Christensen, tells me tears come automatically with breasts. She shrugs them off.

Just under three semesters into my academic career, I don’t find the waterworks easy to dismiss. But, dear reader, you be the judge. Let me know if I blew it or could have handled these situations better:

Case No. 1 – I encourage an outstanding magazine-writing student to pursue an internship with Bloomberg Businessweek, my old employer. Before Bloomberg bought it, the mag had a tradition of taking on bright young interns, most of whom had no business training but who had lots of smarts. A colleague at the mag looks over her materials and says she’d be a wonderful recruit and he could use her skills in projects on business schools; he recommends her, as do I.

But, in myriad ways big and small, BW has changed. Bloomberg has her take a three-hour online test, parts of which are heavy on business knowledge (of which she has none, as everyone involved knows). She fails badly and folks there tell her she’s not a candidate. She comes into my office, crushed and weeping.

So I feel like a heel. I put her into a bad spot, after all, and she suffers for it. It also doesn’t help my credibility with the new BW regime.

Was I wrong? If students are willing to take a test and do badly, is it my fault? I warned her there would be business material on the test, even reviewed some general things with her. But I didn’t realize how much the game had changed. Seems to me I blew it. Did I?

Case No. 2 – As is my normal practice, I flash a student’s paper on the screen from a classroom projector. As a class, we criticize the work. I point out the positives and negatives of the piece, and suggest ways it could be improved. It’s pretty benign and no different from other critiques. We’ve had many such critiques that day. The class doesn’t say much one way or the other about it.

The student waits a bit after the lights come up, but then mutters to me, “you gave me a terrible grade on the paper, then humiliated me in front of everyone. I’m done. That’s it.” And she storms out, furious and in tears.

Her grade, a C+, was not on the screen, though her name was (regular practice in these editing and review sessions). Also, while rushing out, she informs me she will drop another class with me that she had signed up for the following semester and, later, she tops it all of by giving me a scathing evaluation at the end of the course.

Is it wrong to criticize students’ work publicly? The class involved peer-editing, so students criticized one another’s work in every assignment. And, in journalism don’t we face critics every time a reader opens a paper and curses about something he or she reads? In the end, I don’t fault myself for this one, but the drama did throw me.

Case No. 3 – A student has promised a colleague that she would deliver a finished video about a trip the colleague and I took with eight students to Kazakhstan in May. The students are no longer in our classes; some have even graduated, so we have no real sway over them.

The due-date comes and she hasn’t got the goods, but has several legit-sounding reasons. The colleague and I bemoan the fact that several students are behind – a hassle he has had in prior classes – and he gets a bit hot about the general problem. It’s a big thorn in the side for him.

The student, a smart and delightful videographer, breaks into tears. She then begins to apologize, explaining that it’s the time of the month for her (she really said that), she’s got problems with moving to a new city and she’s been working and traveling nonstop for weeks. My heart, frankly, goes out to her. I say, it’s not you that’s the problem here; it’s the general issue of how we can get students to comply with deadlines. I’m sure you will get your work done (which eventually she does, at least most of her work).

When I complain to my colleague later that we shouldn’t be making girls cry, he says, “They make themselves cry.” It’s not his problem, but theirs, he suggests.

So, was she being manipulative? Were we right to rant? Is a deadline a deadline?

Case No. 4 – A top student interviews with an internship recruiter. She says a couple silly things – including asking whether she needs to tell her soccer league that she can’t referee for a week during the internship – and strikes a tone the recruiter says is arrogant. In fact, he tells me afterward that he’s written “humility?” several times on his notes about her.

She comes by and I tell her I’m going to give her some no-holds-barred criticism about her interview. It won’t help her, I say, if I mince words, so I don’t. I tell her precisely what the interviewer had told me, and advise that appearing arrogant cannot help in such settings. You’ve got to seem humble, even it’s just for appearances. She breaks into tears, denies arrogance and says she was not asking for a week off for soccer. He misunderstood, she says, pleadingly.

This is one where tough-love was warranted, I believe. Still, the waterworks were troublesome. My own self-criticism: do mock interviews with students first from now on, giving them pointers that can spare them from making such mistakes. (By the way, she got the internship).

So dear reader, what say you? Are tears something teachers should slough off? Is it better that our kids shed them before they get into the workplace, where the consequences of mistakes can be far uglier? And how would you advise someone, still mystified by the half-adult psyches of undergrads, to deal with them? I’m thinking maybe I’ll just tell the kids that there is still no crying in baseball.

Bring on those stock-market "vipers"

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:10:00 +0000

Andrew Jackson, the country’s seventh president, was famous for railing against the financiers of the early 1800s. They speculated on “the breadstuffs of the country,” he warned. “Should I let you go on, you will ruin 50,000 families and that will be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

The quote, a favorite of bloggers who fret about plots to establish a new world order and such, would be at home today in the superheated arguments over high-frequency trading. The latest diatribe, I’m sad to say, comes from a dear friend and former colleague at Bloomberg Businessweek. Peter Coy writes, “The bigger the financial sector, the more dangerous it becomes.” He bemoans the flood of smart people going into the business, noting that a quarter of Harvard’s brainiacs in the early 2000s were drawn into investment banking and like fields. And he complains about banks “cranking up their trading operations in a way that imperils the financial system once again.”

His indictment, based on the May 6 flash crash, is headlined “What’s the Rush?” And his subhed warns “The American financial system is erratic and voracious, and keeps score in milliseconds. Here’s how to rein in the beast.” Among his prescriptions: a transactions tax of a few cents per $100 to “throw sand into the gears of high-frequency trading,” higher margin and collateral requirements, and steps such as new taxes to reduce corporate debt (on the idea that we’re being assailed by waves of “debt-fueled speculation.”)

Oh, come now, Peter. Let’s dial it down a bit. First, while the Great Recession was in part the fault of Wall Street, it was not a high-frequency phenomenon. Rather, we can blame bad securitization practices, flawed housing policies in Washington, poor market oversight and a raft of other well-documented problems. Superfast trading may have helped stocks crater, but it was not the force that drove them down.

Yes, one must admit that May 6 was not a good day for the high-frequency set. No matter how short-lived, the $800 billion plunge in the value of U.S. stocks that day was worrisome. Stocks such as Accenture slipped to a penny from $40 (before bouncing back) in trading patches as short as eight seconds. Clearly, something was amiss in the superfast computers at the likes of Getco.

But let’s keep a few things in perspective. First, after going haywire the market did correct itself. Prices came back, in most cases rapidly. The Dow lost 1,138.69 points from its high in crazed intraday trading on May 6, but closed just 341.9 points down, and regained all that and then some by May 10. Erratic? No doubt. Voracious. Okay, but when have traders been anything but?

Let’s concede that there’s something bizarre about high-frequency trading. Its relationship to real value in stocks is remote at best. So, too, is its connection to fundamentals such as corporate strategy, earnings power, savvy management. All that good stuff that financial journalists, MBAs and CEOs – and maybe even the odd stockbroker -- prize is a few solar systems away from the zippy stock-swapping at Hard Eight Futures, Quantlab Financial and such. Those guys, snapping to the beat of their own algorithms, don’t give a hoot about such things. It’s all numbers, bro.

Let’s concede, too, that the liquidity the HFT pack supposedly brings is an illusion. It is most likely gone when most needed. The simile Peter uses – “like a swimming pool that dries up just as you jump off the high dive” – is apt (hat’s off to his wordsmithing). It’s hard to see just what value the high-freqs bring to anyone but themselves.

But, so what? Speculators, those oft-reviled folks who put the zing in stock markets, have always been in the game for the gamble. They see Wall Street as a massive roulette wheel and believe that any way they can tilt the spin to their favor – legally – is fair play. In an odd way, they are cousins to technical analysts who have long played markets free of the burden of fundamentals. Are we to ban the technical folk because their charts are more like astrology than investment? They, too, are an odd subculture of market players whose powers over stock movements one could decry.

Surely, there needs to be policing to make sure high-freqs don’t misuse the power they have to move markets. They do swap millions of shares in ridiculously short periods of times, all but blind to fundamental values. At times, they account for disturbingly high amounts of volume. If they intentionally – or through glitches – knock stocks down to absurd levels to profiteer in some market-cornering way, they need to be rapped hard for that. Fines, perhaps, or suspensions of trading privileges could be used to rein them in.

But imposing transactions taxes or worse seems like overkill. Such steps would penalize all players for the perfidy of a few. Let’s use the scalpel instead of the meat-axe and target the bad boys, not just the folks looking for an edge of a few milliseconds on the next guy.

By the way, it’s passably ironic that Peter’s employer, Bloomberg, as well as Dow Jones and other data-providers are tripping over themselves to serve up market data ever more quickly to the high-freq bunch. Some go so far as to rent out space to traders -- at premium prices -- so they can house their computers cheek-by-jowl with providers’ machines and save milliseconds of transmission time. What these providers know, just as traders do, is that timely information is still everything in this game.

Every technological advance that changes the playing field makes folks nervous. Luddism is a natural reaction. Moreover, the markets have long been the playground of innovators and, as a consequence, the targets of critics. In 1887 the head of the Chicago Board of Trade forcibly removed telegraph gear from the floor of the CBOT because he couldn’t abide the electronic links to notorious Chicago bucket shops, as recounted by Rutgers historian David Hochfelder. One NYSE broker in 1889 complained that the “indiscriminate distribution of stock quotations to every liquor-saloon and other places has done much to interfere with business.”

We may not like the high-speed folks. We may deride them as little more than turbocharged gamblers, as Rain Man-like idiot savants unfairly using their powers to enrich themselves while adding nothing to the game. But they will be players so long as there’s money to be made. We can take the profit out if they don’t play by the rules (and, by the way, maybe some of those smart Harvard types in finance can cook up better rules to keep market ripples from becoming tsunamis). Let’s not, however, make life onerous for everyone in the process.

Labor Day Thoughts: Save Wall Street!

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 19:51:00 +0000

Desperate for daylight at the end of a seemingly endless tunnel, investors took heart from the latest jobs report. The Dow climbed nearly 128 points on the Sept. 3 news that hiring seems to be getting back in style, at least in parts of the economy. But banks, hedge funds and other financial players on and off Wall Street seem not to have gotten the word. They’re still stumbling in the dark when it comes to adding staff.

Even while scattered reports of modest additions pop up in the daily press, there’s little evidence that the sun will shine soon on the financial sector. Nationally, the number of people working in financial services barely budged in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Counting both finance and insurance, the tally has skittered to some 5.64 million people, the lowest monthly count since February 1999 and a sorry shadow of the nearly 6.18 million who toiled in the sector in the go-go days of late 2006.

What’s the problem? Blame economic sluggishness, Washington demagoguery and, most of all, rampant uncertainty. Financiers, like lots of other folks, don’t know whether a much-trumpeted double-dip recession is in the offing. They still don’t know what exactly the folks in D.C. will loose on them in the way of financial reform. And, more immediately, they don’t know whether those customers they’ve been currying favor with for months will ever get off the dime.

Just look at the paralysis in the new-issues market. Over 170 companies have filed for initial public offerings this year, the most since 2007. But now fears abound that the lackluster markets could keep many of those IPOs in the wings. Worse, while aged titans such as GM garner the attention, experts quoted by USA Today warn that lots of innovative little guys seem to staying on the sidelines. It’s those up-and-comers that have driven past market rebounds and created the fee-generating business Wall Street counts on.

The FUD factor seems to be keeping plenty of would-be bankers out of pinstripes, at least for the time being. Fear, uncertainty and doubt have long been enshrined on Wall Street, of course, though folks did seem to forget that in the first half of the opening decade of the 2000s. The last half of the decade, of course, restored FUD in all its ugly glory, cutting short plenty of budding investment-banking careers.
Sadly, the bloodletting has not stopped. Look at New York alone. A modest number of private-sector jobs (29,000) helped keep the statewide unemployment rate at 8.2% in July, the latest period measured by the New York State Department of Labor. But the job count in financial activities is down 7,200 from July 2009.

Eventually, the numbers in lower Manhattan and nationally will turn around. Finance is too important to keep shrinking. Companies will need capital and they’ll have to look to Wall Street to rustle it up. Investors, too, will rediscover value in those beaten-down stocks. It may be, in fact, that the market just got ahead of itself and needed the bracing slap it got in recent months.

But that doesn’t mean the capital markets couldn’t use some help from Washington. Certainly, money won’t be on the table – plenty was already spent and demagogues have made it all but impossible for more stimulus money to go to Wall Street, at least directly. What’s more, tax relief for big-money investors seems hardly likely.

What Washington could do, however, is clarify the rules. Chip away at that uncertainty by making it clear what sorts of risk-taking will be tolerated and what won’t be. Make sure that big banks have the ability to take prudent risks – certainly not the foolhardy ones that pushed a few erstwhile titans over the cliff a few years ago, but smart and necessary gambles, nonetheless. If animal spirits are suppressed, no real recovery is possible. If bankers fear more Congressional perp walks, how can they back the next Apple or Microsoft?

And another thing Washington could do is put an end to Wall Street-bashing. The next round of elections, sadly, will likely spawn a fresh wave of attacks on fatcats, bankers and assorted financial miscreants. The targets are all too easy to hit and pillorying them plays well in the hard-pressed corners of America where finance is a four-letter word. Look for the rhetoric to ratchet up.

Today’s financiers, of course, can shake off the attacks – so long as there’s no legislation attached to them. But if the best and brightest of the post-recession generation listen to the Populist set and shun the vilified sector, who will fill those jobs eventually? If we are to keep yet another national industrial champion – Wall Street -- from losing out to foreign rivals, our most talented hands will be needed. Our leaders ought to be making them feel good about it, not ashamed. And our bankers ought to be taking a few more chances and hiring them.

Economic Slowdown: Ideology at Work

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:05:00 +0000

To the Obama-haters at the Wall Street Journal, the stubborn economic slowdown reflects business’ fear of looming tax hikes. The Administration-friendly folks at the New York Times, by contrast, blame the lackluster economy on political stalemate in Washington. Meantime, over at Bloomberg Businessweek, they tell us it’s all a matter of us having our cake and eating it, too -- loving both the Bush-era low taxes and Obama-era high spending and failing to choose between the two.

The inability of our economy to surge back consistently from the Great Recession has become a Rorschach test for pundits. They look at the ugly blot and discern a pattern, one that – not surprisingly – reflects their biases. Love small government and Bush-era tax cuts? Obama’s overreaching is to blame for our woes. Never met a problem that more money from Washington couldn’t solve? It’s the shortfall in such largesse that is making that blot so skinny. And if they can’t make up their minds, they blame both Bush-era “wisdom and folly” – whatever that fence-straddling phrase means.

For my money, the reality is more a matter of the Depression-era notion of pushing on a string. Our policymakers can’t find the levers that will kickstart the economy, that will ignite the animal spirits of our business leaders, and that will drive down the pathologically high unemployment rate. Nothing seems to work, though the folks at the Fed aim to keep pushing whatever buttons they can. Their newest tack, revealed on Aug. 10: buying up more Treasury debt to keep interest rates low.

In the end, the problem may be that the hole we put ourselves into in the Great Recession is just depressingly deep. It took years to dig. And it could take years, sadly, for us to find our way out. To take just one measure, U.S. employment plunged by more than six percent in the recession that began in 2007, the steepest fall of any of the 11 recessions we’ve suffered through since World War II. To take another measure, these downturns lasted from six to 16 months, and our latest slide – believed to have ended in 2009, though the National Bureau of Economic Research has yet to date it – will almost certainly prove to be longer than any of them. (For policy wonks, the Minneapolis Fed puts all these comparisons into perspective here.)

If history proves anything, however, it’s that economies do claw their way back. Sometimes, they do so with the help of Washington. Sometimes, they move on despite government meddling, however well-intentioned. Even today, economists don’t agree on whether D.C. pulled us out of the Depression or prolonged it – making that bout of global misery our first and biggest political and economic Rorschach test.

It’s no comfort to people who have been out of work for months or even years at this point. It’s also small comfort to investors or people considering whether to deploy capital, especially since they are still sussing out Washington’s new regulatory reach. And, if this downturn proves at all similar to earlier ones, whole industries will emerge reshaped as a result of it (think Detroit), not to mention companies (think GM). We will come out of this as a far different economy with areas like Internet-related industries taking a dominant place over the manufacturing icons of the past. (How is it that people still have enough money for iPads?)

Following every twist and turn in this uneven recovery is enough to generate serious palpitations. For players in the capital markets – or anyone, for that matter -- it’s healthier to set aside the dire headlines of the moment and keep your eyes on the horizon, however distant it seems. Bet on a long slow ride up, with lots of dips. Keynes famously said that in the long run, we are all dead. But at the moment, the promise of the long run is the only thing we have to hang onto.

Treason? WikiLeaks and the press

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:31:00 +0000

Should some secrets stay secret? And is it treasonous for news operations to report on leaks of war documents when their countries are at war?

These questions arise, of course, because of the release of 92,000 documents about the Afghanistan war by WikiLeaks, in coordination with London’s Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. The ugly affair raises still further questions about what constitutes patriotism, how the Net makes high-quality journalism tougher to practice, and what governments will now do to try to bury their secrets even deeper.

First off, did the papers act properly? At first blush, it appears that at least two of the organizations -- the Times and Der Spiegel -- were maneuvered into this joint release. The instigator, it seems, was The Guardian, which had learned that WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange intended to release the papers unfiltered on his Swedish-based Web site. The editors at the Guardian suggested the joint release, apparently persuading Assange that he would make a bigger splash that way. This, at least, is the account given to PBS.

The papers then faced some tough choices: first, do they release the documents, along with their own independent reporting and analysis, and, second, do they share the information with the White House, giving the government a chance to react? On the first count, it seems that the papers really had no choice. After all, the documents would be out on the site no matter what the papers did, and, most likely, they would appear in print (since none of the three competing papers could trust the others to hold back). In short, WikiLeaks held the cards in this high-stakes poker game and it played the papers against one another.

Then the question was, what should the editors do with the information? The New York Times contacted the White House and got its reaction – its take that there was nothing really new in the documents. The White House also did not ask that the Times hold back on publishing the papers (probably realizing the move would be futile). Instead, it got a chance to put its spin on the news, likely hoping to quash the whole matter by offering the “nothing new” take. Certainly, the troops wouldn't be surprised (see Ed Stein's cartoon above).

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, laid out the issue nicely in a sidenote to the stories. He noted that the paper had a month to report out the story and that it sought to eliminate any references that could endanger the lives of Allied forces or Afghan supporters. He also suggested that the WikiLeaks folks had the mainstream media over a barrel, arguing “To say that it is an independent organization is a monumental understatement. The decision to post this secret military archive on a Web site accessible to the public was WikiLeaks’, not ours. WikiLeaks was going to post the material even if The Times decided to ignore it.”

Since then, of course, split opinion has emerged on just how problematic the release has been. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden told the folks at Politico that “We’re going to get people killed because of this.” And Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat who chairs an intelligence subcommittee, said the documents give the Taliban a hunting list: “There are names of State Department officials, U.S. military officials, Afghans and the cities in which they live in the materials.” By posting them online, she said, “we’ve just served up a target list and an enemies list to the Taliban. ... Real people die when sources and methods are revealed.”

For his part, WikiLeaks’ founder Assange said on MSNBC that about 15,000 reports were withheld because they could have revealed the identities of Afghans who have aided U.S. forces and exposed them to “the risk of retributive action” from warlords or the Taliban. For a better sense of who Assange is and what drives him, check out an interview he gave to the folks at TED, the conference organization on the West Coast.

Seems to me there’s no doubt that the leak of the papers in the first place was treasonous. If proved to be the source, Pfc. Bradley Manning will likely spend the rest of his life in jail. The Army intelligence analyst, also suspected of leaking a video a few months ago of a couple Reuters photographers being killed in Baghdad,will be lucky – in other times, he’d be shot. Now, one would guess, the Obama Administration won’t risk making Manning, an impossibly baby-faced twenty-something in his AP photo, into a martyr. Some of Manning’s friends, too, may be implicated, and one wonders whether they had a duty to inform on him before his alleged leaks.

As for WikiLeaks, the legal situation will be tricky but it seems the U.S. can do little against it. Even if Swedish authorities try to muzzle the site, some there, such as Sweden’s Pirate Party, are already offering help. Of course, Assange might never again be able to travel to the U.S. or perhaps to his Australian homeland, since he could be picked up for various violations. Australia is part of the coalition fighting in Afghanistan. Indeed, one has to wonder just where he can go in the West without being pursued.

Some folks are saluting the leaks, praising the media outlets for publicizing the documents, and ignoring or rebutting questions of treason. "I'm more concerned about the troop threat caused by our nation's involvement in a war that lacks the backing of the Afghan people or fiscal accountability for the $330 billion we have pumped into the longest war in U.S. history,” argues a colleague at Nebraska, Assoc. Prof. Bernard McCoy. “What do we have to show for this? With corrupt Afghan political leaders and insurgents who, according to our own intelligence reports, are as strong as ever, our troops remain at great risk.”

And comparisons to the Pentagon Papers abound. That secret history of the Vietnam war, detailing a wealth of information not revealed to the public and quite embarrassing to the politicians of the day, was published first by the New York Times and then the Washington Post, both in mid-1971. The papers were an official Defense Department study of U.S. activities in Vietnam from 1945-67. A former colleague at BUSINESS WEEK, Mark Ivey, says of the current leak, “Viet Nam, relived.”

But the new documents, including raw intelligence memos, were nowhere as well-researched or vetted as the Pentagon Papers were. The Afghan War documents may be rife with errors and could prove useful in the end only to vengeful Taliban. Joshua Foust, a contributor to Current Intelligence, argues, “If I were a Taliban operative with access to a computer — and lots of them have access to computers — I’d start searching the WikiLeaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then I’d kill whomever I could identify. Those deaths would be directly attributable to WikiLeaks.”

For my part, it seems clear that the leaks could not be stopped once insiders in the military or elsewhere in the intelligence establishment made up their minds to release the papers. If it hadn’t been for WikiLeaks, someone else in the anything-goes Net universe would likely have found a way to help them surface. At that point, the news organizations acted well in doing what savvy reporters do – they put the documents into context and fleshed them out.

Yes, the newspapers were played by Assange. But they gave the public a far richer and more useful account than he would have by releasing the documents alone. In the case of the New York Times at least, the U.S. government also had a chance to frame the discussion and attempt to minimize the damage.

Will anything change now? It seems some Afghans will be in danger. Pakistan’s intelligence service is likely embarrassed and angry. And the U.S. intelligence agencies will now seek stronger means to keep secrets under lock and key. But, unlike the Pentagon Papers, revelations seem few and there’s little in the papers even to strengthen the case of the antiwar folks.

President Obama’s war in Afghanistan has been messy from the start. Too few forces to begin with. A publicly revealed deadline for drawdown. A military leadership that was anything but politic. Unless his plans for military victory start paying off soon – with real gains against the Taliban and Al Qaeda -- the WikiLeaks affair will go down as another troubling turn -- probably a small one -- in a painful, prolonged and maybe doomed battle against Islamist terrorism. This ethical contretemps pales before that ugly reality.

McGraw-Hill: Time to Deal?

noreply@blogger.com (Joseph Weber) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:50:00 +0000

It’s only business. But that was a hard and personal lesson for many staffers at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine. It may yet become a tough lesson for the leaders of McGraw-Hill Cos.

When McGraw-Hill, my employer of 22 years, cut BW loose by selling it to Bloomberg last year, plenty of BW folks felt betrayed. They had committed their careers to the magazine and bought the argument of leaders there that the eighty-year commitment the McGraw family had to the weekly was a forever thing. So long as a McGraw was in charge, McGraw-Hill (MHP) would never sell it, the leaders counseled.

Well, they were wrong, of course. BW, viewed at McGraw-Hill as just another money-losing Internet victim, was quickly snapped up by the business wire. And soon, despite assurances from the Bloomberg camp that the deal was more about buying talent than a big brand name, most of the 200-plus BW vets were let go. It was a harsh dose of the business world’s version of realpolitik, the kind of thing BW folks had reported on but that few of them had experienced. With its formidable global reporting force, Bloomberg just didn’t need all that pricey BW talent.

Now, pundits are vaunting the idea that McGraw-Hill could – or should – be in someone’s sights. Pearson PLC, the $9 billion-a-year British publishing company, is one of the names floated as the perfect acquirer. Textbooks, synergies, global footprint, etc. Such takeover talk, which has long dogged $6 billion-a-year McGraw-Hill, seems as rational and predictable as Bloomberg’s interest in BW. The 101-year-old MHP has been struggling lately with single-digit declines in both net income (down 8.6% last year) and revenue (down 6.3%).

It is perhaps sad, but former BW folks are likely salivating at the prospect of MHP’s demise as an independent company. Turnabout is fair play, as the British say. Even more than that, however, many BW vets have stock options that have been underwater for a few years now [full disclosure: as former chief of correspondents for the magazine, I’m among them. I took a modest number of options with me when I left last year before Bloomberg appeared on the scene]. MHP’s shares traded as high as $72 in mid-2007. They now struggle around $30, after dipping below $24 last fall. In purely stock-market terms, the company seems like a flatliner whose glory days are long behind it.

McGraw-Hill’s challenges loom as high as BW’s once did (and still do). Uncertain prospects cloud the future for MHP’s once high-flying Standard & Poor’s ratings machine, given the vagaries of government regulation, general litigiousness and the tarring the ratings agencies have taken in the recent recession. The recently passed financial reform could cut its margins and expose it to more lawsuits, as S&P president Deven Sharma himself has recently warned (and S&P also warned about rival Moody’s in cutting the rating on the other rating agency giant, a peculiar irony). Prospects are also questionable for MHP’s storied textbook operation, given hard-pressed state education budgets and the march of the Net in the text realm. Flat stock prices? Who should be surprised?

The big question, of course, is whether Pearson or someone else would see as much value in McGraw-Hill as Bloomberg did in BW. The jury is out on whether Bloomberg’s move was a smart one – so far, its main value seem to be putting the Bloomberg name regularly in front of 4.5 million sets of eyeballs at a bargain price. Pearson could likely eliminate a lot of duplication by folding MHP’s textbook operation into its line. As for S&P, that odd beast could be of use to Pearson (which owns the Financial Times along with the world’s biggest textbook publishing operation) or, perhaps, to a Reuters or other financial information service. Certainly, rating agencies are needed and, even without the crazy-days growth of the past and the threat of a litigious future, S&P seems valuable. Slicing and dicing MHP among a few acquirers might make sense.

The atmosphere also seems right. Conditions are much different than 1979, when then-CEO Harold McGraw Jr. repelled a takeover bid by American Express. The popular CEO could rally his family and other loyalists and beat back the challenge. Given the recent anemic stock performance and dubious prospects at the company, current CEO Harold W. (Terry) McGraw III, son of the now-deceased Harold, might find fewer sentimental supporters nowadays. What's more, the current CEO might do his family and friends a huge favor by putting his company into a global powerhouse that can do something with its still-valuable assets.

Business has precious little room for sentiment, of course. McGraw-Hill taught that lesson to former BW lifers in painful fashion. If a smart acquirer could do more with the bits and pieces of McGraw-Hill, so be it. Certainly, that would be a better fate than watching the company wither into irrelevance. And for stockholders, the premium should at least take the price close to its long-gone high. A deal might be the business world’s version of justice.