Many factors contributed to this success. But the FT’s string of M&A scoops during that era, many by Lewis, helped. In 1999, Lewis and the FT shocked the business-media world by revealing Exxon Corp.’s plans to buy Mobil Corp., citing sources close to both companies. The deal, eventually valued at $81 billion, was a record at the time. After Exxon-Mobil, deal scoops became a major selling point in FT marketing. A 2000 Pearson press release announcing the opening of the FT’s new US headquarters cited the Exxon-Mobil scoop and “countless other high-profile mergers” as evidence of the paper’s prowess in breaking “stories of international and domestic import.” In a 2001 cover story on the FT’s rise in BusinessWeek (“The Financial Times Takes on the World”), the paper’s US managing editor at the time, Robert Thomson (who now holds that job at The Wall Street Journal), pointed to the paper’s success at wresting deal scoops from the Journal. Cheekily, he boasted that while the Journal was good at covering ‘‘midsize companies doing middling deals in the Midwest,” the FT was capturing the more glamorous global deals. “It’s a Lexus-Taurus thing,” he said.
A successful run on the M&A beat became a career launching pad, too. Lipin, after a promotion at the Journal, parlayed his success and considerable contacts in the M&A world into a lucrative post running the US operations of Brunswick Group, a corporate communications firm. Nikhil Deogun, who succeeded Lipin and enjoyed his own impressive run, would rise to deputy managing editor at the paper; he is now a top news executive at CNBC. And after promotions within the FT, Lewis rose within British journalism circles to become the youngest-ever (at thirty-seven) editor in chief of The Daily Telegraph in 2006; he is now an executive member of the Management and Standards Committee at News Corp. Faber remains one of CNBC’s top personalities.
Few business journalism careers have been as meteoric as that of Andrew Ross Sorkin, who through a series of deal scoops almost single-handedly propelled The New York Times to new prominence in business news. In 2001, according to a 2009 profile in New York magazine by Gabriel Sherman, Sorkin developed the idea for DealBook, the then-innovative idea of a free, e-mailed newsletter of major merger news of the day. Within months, Sorkin more than doubled his hoped-for goal of 30,000 subscribers. Today it has more than 200,000. Before he was thirty-one, he was awarded a section-front column and made an assistant editor of business and finance news. Last year, Sorkin added a new job: in addition to editing DealBook, he is co-anchor of Squawk Box on CNBC. It makes sense.
Sorkin, in the New York profile, shrugged off the charge that he is too close to his sources and conceded that his style is not adversarial. “I don’t come to the table with an ax to grind—that helps me,” he says. At another point he says: “I think to the extent that I’ve been able to get inside the room, it’s a function of hopefully coming to the table and being fair and open. But also coming to the table and being sufficiently skeptical, but not cynical.”
But the question is not whether a reporter is either skeptical or cynical; the question is, About what?
To complain that a deal reporter is too close to his sources is like complaining that a baseball player’s bat is too close to the ball. The idea is to connect with the ball, just as the idea of deal reporting is to get close to a source and get the scoop. Deal reporting is perhaps as transactional a relationship as any in journalism. It often involves an intricate negotiation between reporter and source. Being close to sources is, essentially, the point.
I argued last year (in “The Price of Admission,” CJR, March/April 2010, my review of Sorkin’s financial-crisis best-seller, Too Big to Fail), that this access/accountability duality should be understood as nothing more than what it is: a division of labor. Both are good. But they’re different.
Interesting idea, Dean. I wonder how it fits in the FONosphere though, given the idea, near universal, that anything other than market-actionable "scoops" are a generalized commodity, worth nothing at all.
Also, you call Pearson PLC's $160 million expansion, which gained the company 91,000 new readers, "a success." Really? At $1,700 per?
#1 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Tue 10 Jan 2012 at 03:56 PM
Dean - if M&A reporters jobs is to cozy up to dealmakers to get deal term scoops 1st (so readers can trade off it) than isn't the reporter just working for a few on Wall Street and not the reader. AR Sorkin's fail was to warn that any of those levered up 05-07 PE deals might also mean a fail for PE investors when the credit bubble burst. I didn't see Sorkin doing his main street investor readers(most of NYT Biz readers) any service by promoting his banker sources deals with out a few warnings on how the deal terms might bite shareholders in the rear.
#2 Posted by Teri Buhl, CJR on Tue 17 Jan 2012 at 01:17 PM
Most financial reporting can be summed up in a single word - "infomercial".
#3 Posted by Hugh Akston, CJR on Sat 21 Jan 2012 at 02:03 PM
Dean,
Quite agree. However there have been a few voices crying out in the wilderness. \
For years reporters have been pointing out that the rating agencies in the USA were corrupt; the companies being assessed are paying the rating agencies. Also the press pointed out the conflict of interest that Paulson had being a Goldman Sachs loyalist and yet working for the administration in the last crash. But the tank just keeps on rolling. Why? Most of the financial reporters are New Yorkers and steeped in that culture; accepting of Wall Street and its mores and unable to cast a critical eye over it. Like the money honey from Brooklyn, they just tell it how it is. Actually getting stuck into Wall Street is not on their radar. To get a good and aggressive business press, I suggest using more aggressive outsiders e.g. Harvard economics professors and Stanford experts too. It was a Stanford academic, a doctor with alzberger syndrome who finally worked out the mortgage CDO plot by going over k10 reports from 1 am to 5 am., according to a long piece in Vanity Fair.
But why did the press allow Pres. Clinton to abolish the Glass Steagall Act without a word? I think Americans are too much in awe of the office of President and the 'sacred' Constitution. Ridiculous. Clinton was a flawed as the rest of us. He only did it to allow the merger of Travellers and Citigroup( making along the way former Travellers CEO Sandy Weill rich beyond the dreams of avarice).
#4 Posted by Pamela Griffiths Clark , CJR on Tue 21 Feb 2012 at 07:51 AM
Hugh Akston called financial reporting an “informercial.” So it’s not really reporting. The financial media is now a trade publication, not journalism. They repeatedly interview propagandists (from Koch funded groups). It would be nice to have journalism.
Even the MSM now functions as press agent, he said she said, race barkers, and gotcha, rather than journalism. The media tells us we live in a globalized world, and then their Wall Street owners cut out investigative reporting and foreign correspondents.
Journalism is closely related to science. Throughout history, the arts and sciences have often been supported in some way by the state. They and journalism are essential public services that the market does not always support. (The cure for bad science is more science, for bad journalism is more journalism, etc.)
Successful nations have always managed their affairs and pursued their interests. Our important use of the free market is only one function. Laissez faire theory, that we should have ONLY a market, has no support in the historical record. “You can’t pick winners” is also false. Many technologies and products started with some gov’t support. We need both public policy and private entrepreneurship in a free market. A public private partnership may be needed to create business journalism.
On the issue raised by Pamela Clark, in the 1990s, the mantra of Republicans and Texas Gov. Bush was self-regulation. We saw how that worked out. Regarding deregulation under Clinton, since we do not have public funding of elections, another essential, Democrats serve business. They agreed to deregulation because the banks were doing so well, and the deal was that there would still be adequate regulation. They had no way to know that Bush/Cheney would run an orgy of deregulation, due their appointees. (Some states tried to regulate the growing subprime mess and were block by the Bush administration.)
Recall the other deals that Bush violated?
(It wasn’t a war act, it was a war powers act. Hank Paulson would not need to use what he called his bazooka if we gave it to him. Limit CO2 and other similarities to Gore. Be a uniter, instead of appointing extremists.)
#5 Posted by Harry Thorn, CJR on Thu 8 Mar 2012 at 10:15 PM