Tuesday, August 21, 2007

This morning I stepped onto the podium to help ring the Opening Bell for the New York Stock Exchange. I'm here with 38 other educators learning how the market is changing, and moving more into an automated exchange.

About 9:15 we were summoned to go down to the bell podium overlooking the main floor of the exchange. John Thain, CEO of the exchange, accompanied our group. We looked out over the floor with our eyes on the digitial clock right in front of use. Traders gathered to watch, as our group representative, Chris, a teacher from Brighton, Mich. pressed the green bell button precisely at 9:29:50. A focus of concentration, he pressed the button for 10 seconds, and when the bell stopped it's clang, trading began.

The sound is deafening, let me tell you. And we all hoped for an up market, though the futures market, which had opened earlier, was down. Not a good bellwether.

See us: http://www.nyse.com/events/1187606558606.html

At the end of "our" day, the NYSE did close down (the NASDAQ closed up) but more than 3 billion shares were traded, contintuing to buck the usual trend of slow trading days in August.

Check back for more information, live from the NYSE.

--Marty Steffens

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Transparency is the new trend

The website, trendwatchng.com, today talks about the newest trend, which is that today’s consumers demand as much transparency as possible. In the news business, how can we make our news more transparent?
Should we have an editor’s note or behind the scenes note with every story, much as magazines do? Should we do video cam broadcasts of story meetings? Should we list a “bibliography” of resources that we use for every story? I know we usually cite the sources of direct quotes, but should we run the sources for all information used in the story. We are transparent when we run reader comments, but should we not allow screen names, and only real names on reader comments?
Should we also do more bio information on our story tags. Such as Jane Roe covers real estate for the Daily News, and has written 281 stories on new home sales in her five years on the beat?
Food for thought. I’d love to hear your comments about increasing transparency in reporting and business reporting.

--Marty Steffens

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Thoughts on David Halberstam

We mourn today the passing of David Halberstam, a writer who elevated meticulous reporting to inspirational heights.

I had the chance to meet David on Saturday, in Berkeley, where he was the keynote speaker at a conference I was attending on “Where History and Journalism Meet.” Earlier that day, I also had a chance to brush past Kevin Jones, the graduate student who was driving David to Menlo Park on Monday when another car broadsided his, instantly killing David.

At his lecture Saturday night, Halberstam shared with us that he’d just finished marking up the final galleys on his latest book, The Coldest Winter, his long-awaited book on the Korean War. The book was long in gestation. In fact, his newest publisher, Scribner, had first announced a 2002 publication date. Halberstam felt this latest book was his best — better than the 21 he’d written before — and better than his highly acclaimed first book, The Best and The Brightest.

He talked at length about how the two books were connected, and interlacing two of his graceful long fingers to demonstrate, he commented that The Longest Winter’s last chapter neatly dovetails with the first of The Best and The Brightest.

The nearly full house at Arthur Andersen Auditorium heard Halberstam offer advice to young journalist, which I quickly scribbled down to use in my “closing ceremony” speech on the last day of class for my capstone seniors.

He said his secret of success was to always work on your weaknesses. A stronger writer, he said he lacked the reporting skills of others (like Bill Kovach and John Siegenthaler) that he saw around him at the Nashville Tennessean. So he worked to overcome his shyness in making cold calls, learning the “legwork” of journalism. Most basketball players, he said, work on the best parts of their game during the off season. But he said that Michael Jordan, the subject of Halberstam’s 2000 book, Playing for Keeps, spent his summers working on weak points, which made Jordan transcend the game.

He also told students to write with authority, and to focus on the “why” as well as why things “do not happen.” He said the most important interview question was the last: “Who else should I see?”

In his years as a journalist, he feels newspapers have become daily magazines, with an ever-increasing need for analysis. He lauded the “pro-bono” spirit of today’s bright young journalists, who forgo higher paying careers to serve their faith in democracy. But he felt the monetary sacrifice was worth it, as journalists are given the spiritual gift to go to work to “learn every day, questioning every thing.”

But he was also saddened by the power that journalism has lost. Halberstam felt media today is weaker than when he was a NYTimes reporter more than 30 years ago. Mostly, he said, because of the loss of readership in the age of new media disruption. But also, after 9/11, media has lost its punch in a struggle not to appear patriotic. The fall of grace by once-esteemed reporter Judith Miller is “the worst wound in the life of the New York Times,” a wound far worse than the Jayson Blair scandal, he says.

As I left the lecture Saturday night, he put out his hand and introduced himself. I told him I taught at Missouri, and he responded, “Fine school.” I shared a quick story about a couple of our mutual acquaintances, and told him I’d use his words for my students.

And so I will share those word with my class, a last legacy of a great man who died too soon. Was he among the last of The Greatest Generation of Journalists? I hope not.


Marty Steffens

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Writing on the birth of Venture Capital

Berkeley, April 21—I’m here today on the campus of the University of California to attend a workshop on how journalists can write history.

One speaker is Spencer Ante of BusinessWeek, who’s writing a biography of Georges Doriot and the birth of the venture capital industry. Doriot is considered to be the father of the U.S. entrepreneurial economy, working mostly in the pivotal post-war era.

Born in France, Doriot came to the U.S. to get an MBA and extended his stay, working for an investment bank and teaching at Harvard Business School. A popular course was one on starting a business.
Over a 40-year teaching career, he would influence thousands of top students, including the founder of FedEx, Fred Smith.
His book will be published later this year by the Harvard Business School Press.

His tips for retelling major business events? Find photos, find correspondence, and don’t overlook libraries like presidential libraries and the Library of Congress that store original documents.
Also, go for tours of the homes in where they lived.

“Go to the places – absorb the light and ambience,” he says. He also got great help and wonderful stories from Doriot family.

What else did he find? That Doriot was an inventor himself, conducing experiments at home as a young student. He appreciated the imagination of others, and sought to fund them.
--Marty Steffens

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Update on data from the BEA

This just in from our friends in Washington. It seems that the Bureau of Economic Analysis www.bea.gov will be launching the GDP by state and Metro Statistical Area in early June. The data will allow biz journalists to closely monitor the economic output of their city or state, thanks to this compilation of IRS, Census and state data.

Speaking of Census, the data wonks there keep pouring stats into their relatively new Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics database. Recent additions are Alaska, Georgia, Mississippi and Utah. To access this mappable and searchable database, go to http://lehd.dsd.census.gov/led/

--Marty Steffens

Saturday, March 10, 2007

"Human" side of reporting


Sometimes business reporters on deadline are snared in the phone tree of major businesses or organizations.

A website may help. It's called, Get Human, www.gethuman.com/us and while it's designed for consumer to get through to a live human being to demand better service, it's useful for the media as well. It lists actual phone numbers for companies in the US, plus instructions on how to fool the phone tree into giving you a live human to direct your call. There are also versions for the UK and Canada.

BTW, the site was founded and is copyrighted by Paul English, a Boston area consumer advocate and tech whiz who started it out of frustration.

--Marty Steffens

Monday, March 5, 2007

Getting the message about business reporting

TALLAHASSEE, FL -- Here at the HBCU 2007 Newspaper and Conference Fair, the word is getting out about the good jobs in business reporting.

With an uncertain job market ahead, students were listening when SABEW came calling to talk about business journalism as a profession. And next year, in Baltimore, there will be a half-day workshop at the 10th annual HBCU Newspaper conference.

I did a workshop on what types of campus stories that students could do that are business related. One ideas was writing about the big business of campus fund-raising, and how campus treat this new generation of donors.

After the conference, I got an email from Darryl B. Manning, staff writer for the Lincoln University Clarion, one of the participants in my business writing workshop in Florida. He's doing a story on big donors to Lincoln, an historically black college in Jefferson City, Mo.

Business journalism needs more minority voices. If we don't increase the diversity in business reporting, then we won't make business reporting interested to a wider community. As it is, business is a white guys club, and diversity in business and in the business journalism profession will only make us stronger.

We'll write more on our diversity outreach efforts in the future.

--Marty Steffens

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Business, the converged media

It seems that the ultimate downside of getting rid of stock agate is that it has downgraded business sections. I just heard from biz ed Karen Miller that the Reading (PA) Eagle has moved its business section inside the paper most days. Yes, behind Sports once again.

And of course, now business staffs are disappearing into the metro fold, as has happened at the Indianapolis Star and Honolulu Advertisers. Of course, this might also infuse more economics into metro coverage, but my concern is that real coverage of business will be lost in favor of a beefed up metro team.

Another trend is for business editors to move into the digital ranks. Russ Stanton of the LATimes moved from business editor post to the new job of Innovation Editor, responsible for a digital thinking at the Times. And I just heard that Jeff Platsky, longtime award-winning biz editor in Binghamton, is moving to a new Digital Editor position at PressConnects, the paper's digital arm. It's possible his old business staff will be absorbed into metro as yet another Gannett paper reshapes itself.

Why does it seem that business editors make the digital turn faster than others in the newsroom? First, the demand for timely business news has always met that biz editors got the need for speed in an online environment. Business news has a lot of models for converged publications such as Bloomberg, Reuters, BusinessWeek and Marketwatch. Even luddite newspapers put stock quotes on telephone service or on the web before they moved other news to it.

Stay tuned, the changes in business sections -- moving inside or going away -- will be the talk of 2007.

--Marty Steffens

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Business news, once again, is change agent

We've often said that business news is helping to drive the move to converged news models. Bloomberg, Reuters, Marketwatch, BusinessWeek, MSN Money and others have run multimedia operations for years.

Now business news is once again a catalyst for change in how we look at counting the number of visitors to websites. Finance users, like those who use Yahoo! Finance, view pages over long periods of time -- if an investor is using it to track a moving stock, the page might be up during the entire trading day -- yet be counted only as one page view. Talk about "sticky!"

The financial web client is a high-value target for advertisers, and new measurements must come into play to monetize business news web sites. Do check out a great piece on this issue by AP Internet Writer Anick Jesdanun. Here's the link:

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/254637,CST-FIN-webads13.article

--Marty Steffens

Business news, once again is change agent

We've often said that business news is helping to drive the move to converged news models. Bloomberg, Reuters, Marketwatch, BusinessWeek, MSN Money and others have run multimedia operations for years.

Now business news is once again a catalyst for change in how we look at counting the number of visitors to websites. Finance users, like those who use Yahoo! Finance, view pages over long periods of time -- if an investor is using it to track a moving stock, the page might be up during the entire trading day -- yet be counted only as one page view. Talk about "sticky!"

The financial web client is a high-value target for advertisers, and new measurements must come into play to monetize business news web sites. Do check out a great piece on this issue by AP Internet Writer Anick Jesdanun. Here's the link:

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/254637,CST-FIN-webads13.article

--Marty Steffens

Thursday, February 8, 2007

New twist on Googling yourself...

Okay, we admit it. We've all "Googled" ourselves.

Many of us have typed our names into multiple search engines to discover just what personal asteroids are orbiting in cyberspace. It usually yields a surprise -- like the photo I found of my lecture in Taichung, Taiwan, on enviro-business journalism.

Today, while researching a fellow journalist who's going to be a guest speaker in my business journalism class, I typed his name into Scholar.Google. Up popped pages of scholarly work where the academic author had cited news stories that he had written. This journalist, a magazine author, was cited in dozens of journals and conference papers, on topics ranging from Artificial Intelligence to Economic Reform.

So I Scholar-Googled myself and found where I'd been thanked or cited in some books, as well. Some I knew about, others were a big surprise.

So, fellow journalists, if you want to see when and where your journalistic work has been cited, just call up www.scholar.google.com and search away.

--Marty Steffens

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Carl Schramm on business journalism

The president of the Kauffman Foundation, the Kansas City-based "think-farm" that promotes and funds research into entrepreneurism, stopped by the University of Missouri campus Tuesday to talk to econ students and faculty.

Carl Schramm has a new book, "The Entrepreneurial Imperative: How America's Economic Miracle Will Reshape the World" (Collins, 2006). It's a sweeping look at a post-Keynesian world, and how entrepreneurism drives a new economic model. Schramm has strong views on immigrations -- for the most part, it should be unfettered. But he goes a step further and advocates that any non-citizen who earns a PhD in a U.S. university should immediately be offered citizenship. He believes that U.S.-educated foreign nationals, especially if they experience entrepreneurism while on campus, will spread this form of individual freedom when they return to their home country.

Later, in a one-on-one, we talked about the role of business journalists. Schramm feels that journalists don't really understand statistics, or economic fundamentals. He's often chagrined (my word) by misleading and mischaracterized statistics in the press. He also believes that reporting on underlying economic issues is shallow.

My recommendation? At 187 pages, Schramm's book is worth putting on the bedstand for a quick read, especially if you are a fan of Tom Friedman's, "The World is Flat."

--Marty Steffens

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

The blending of business and lifestyle news

The line continues to blur between business and lifestyle pubs.

The latest copy of KCB -- short for Kansas City Business -- just landed on my desk. The glossy mag covers CEOs, workplace issues and economic development in a narrative or issues format. It debuted in July, and the February issue is devoted to "Green" issues in the region -- including how area ag companies are racing to harvest more corn for the ethanol boom.

We're hearing that KCB's parent company, Anthem Publishing, has more such publications in the works. Stay tuned for which cities and where!

Of course, blending lifestyle and business isn't exactly new. What's new is how far it extends into smaller cities. South Florida has a few notablel life/style business titles.

The 800-pound gorilla of business journalism, the Wall Street Journal, continues to move in this direction. The addition of color in 2002, accelerated the move. Personal Journal is now the best-read section with columns on wine, fashion and travel, as well as movie reviews. The lifestyle emphasis really takes over in the Saturday edition, which debuted in 2005.
What's driving this? The standard business advertiser, publicly traded companies, banks and financial instutitions, get skittish if the market turns bearish. By appealing to retail, travel and entertainment ads, these pubs broaden their ad base.

And of course, biz pubs have demos that make one drool. In 2005, the Journal's reader had an average income of $191,000, an average household net worth of $2.1 million, and an average age of 55. And of course, they are influential managers.

Anyway, now that mainstream newspapers have dropped most of the stock and mutual fund listings that defined their sections, look for them too, to blend biz and lifestyle.

-- Marty Steffens