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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Fortune

1. August 25, 2011 04:40 PM

   Fortune Inside the Pfizer Fiasco

   A deeply reported piece on a management crisis at the giant drug company

   By Ryan Chittum

   Fortune has a dandy read in this issue on an executive fiasco at Pfizer that led to the sacking of two executives, including the CEO. Or as it puts it on the cover: WHAT HAPPENED at PFIZER The Inside Story of REVENGE, BETRAYAL, and POWER at the Top of the World's Largest Drug Company. Believe it or not, that headline's...

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2. April 6, 2011 08:17 PM

   Audit Notes: BizWeek Soars, Barofsky in Fortune, A Picture of Deflation

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's been more than a year now since Bloomberg took over BusinessWeek, rebranded it, expanded it, and put Josh Tyrangiel at the helm. How's the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek doing? By the ad numbers, it's stomping Fortune and Forbes. The Association of Magazine Media has the first quarter numbers on revenue and ad pages for major magazines. Bloomberg BusinessWeek's ad pages...

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3. November 29, 2011 11:54 PM

   Audit Notes: WSJ’s Facebook Non-News, Bogus Bloomberg, Tabloid Id

   By Ryan Chittum

   Fortune's Dan Primack calls out The Wall Street Journal for hyping non-news on page one that Facebook is going to launch an IPO in the spring for somewhere near $100 billion. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal got a huge amount of attention for reporting that Facebook is preparing to go public next year in an IPO that could value the...

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4. November 2, 2010 06:30 PM

   Audit Notes: Jamie’s WaMu Dud, Sloan on Foreclosuregate, Sorkin

   By Ryan Chittum

   Bloomberg Bloomberg Markets takes a long look at the troubles facing JPMorgan Chase, the latest of which is that Jamie Dimon's bank is under investigation by the SEC in connection with a Magnetar deal. But how about that Washington Mutual deal: JPMorgan is now saddled with $74.8 billion in nonperforming home loans inherited from WaMu, a third of the $230.7...

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5. May 25, 2011 07:44 PM

   Audit Notes: Marketers’ Memories, Labor’s Last Legs, Fortune in Afghanistan

   By Ryan Chittum

   Over at Wired, Jonah Lehrer looks at how marketers invade our heads: A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my flawed nostalgia for Coke. It turns out that vivid commercials are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of long-term memory in the brain) into believing...

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6. November 23, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: not Fortune tellers; Foursquare, two million; Big Ten

   The magazine's picks for future Apple and Microsoft CEOs go awry immediately

   By Ryan Chittum

   Fortune peered into its crystal ball for the October 29 issue and came up with four "best bets" on who's in line to replace four tech CEOs, presumably years down the road (although it's a wonder how Steve Ballmer continues to hang on at Microsoft). The mag's top picks: iPhone chief Scott Forstall at Apple and Windows honcho Steven Sinofsky...

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7. April 8, 2011 12:30 AM

   Becky Quick Thinks the Fed Is Too Focused on Jobs

   That makes no sense historically or in the current context

   By Ryan Chittum

   CNBC's Becky Quick uses her Fortune column to argue that the Federal Reserve should break the law. The law says the Federal Reserve has to focus on two mandates: Keeping prices stable and keeping unemployment below 4 percent. That's what Congress said in the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. Quick, bizarrely, thinks that the Fed focuses too much on the full-employment...

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8. December 28, 2010 09:23 AM

   Best of 2010: Dean Starkman

   CJR's Kingsford Capital Fellow picks his top stories of the year

   By Dean Starkman

   The Hamster Wheel. Why running as fast as we can is getting us nowhere. The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics, it’s live-blogging the opening ceremonies, and matching...

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9. December 24, 2010 01:20 PM

   Best of 2010: Ryan Chittum

   Chittum picks his top stories from 2009 2010

   By Ryan Chittum

   Business Journalism on Prozac: A look at an issue of Fortune finds the magazine painting a picture of the corporate world so rosy it’s almost unrecognizable. While it’s individual pieces may be accurate (and for that matter worthwhile), the whole adds up to something that’s deeply misleading. The Real Dow. The press almost never reports stock prices in context. It...

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10. October 8, 2012 06:50 AM

    Jack Welch and anti-business sentiment

    The former GE CEO, still a business press hero

    By Ryan Chittum

    Former GE CEO Jack Welch made waves last week claiming—with zero evidence—that the Obama administration manipulated the unemployment report that showed joblessness dropping to 7.8 percent last month. Now that's kooky. But it's not too surprising coming from Welch (whom I was writing this post about even before his conspiratorial tweet). Take for example the latest Fortune column by him...

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11. October 9, 2012 01:51 PM

    Neutron Jack: ‘I quit!’

    Welch ends Fortune and Reuters contracts after tough coverage

    By Ryan Chittum

    I've long wondered why business magazines run Jack Welch's columns. BusinessWeek ran it for years but stopped a month after Bloomberg bought the magazine and installed Josh Tyrangiel as editor. As Tyrangiel later told Capital New York, "There was a lot management guru bullshit, to be honest. A lot of stuff about finding the best you, and I just thought,...

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12. April 7, 2011 11:46 AM

    ProPublica and Fortune’s Unhelpful Post on GE’s Taxes

    Taking the company's word for it to rebut The New York Times

    By Ryan Chittum

    Fortune's Allan Sloan and ProPublica's Jeff Gerth asserted a couple of days ago that The New York Times got it wrong when it said GE paid no American tax last year. Fortune even gives it a Business Insider-style headline: "The truth about GE's tax bill." What's the truth they spent all these months digging up? The company says that it's...

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13. November 23, 2010 07:53 PM

    Quick Facts on the China Trade

    You didn't read them in Fortune

    By Ryan Chittum

    CNBC's Becky Quick tosses off a dud over at Fortune, telling us all to "Stop the Beijing bashing!" because the "The health of the U.S. economy depends on trade with China." The people appearing in the pages of Fortune and on the pixels of CNBC would have you believe that's true. It's part of the air they breathe. But it's...

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14. July 27, 2011 10:22 AM

    Rupert Murdoch and the Corporate Culture of News Corp.

    Its abysmal corporate governance is symptomatic of a deeper disregard for the rules

    By Ryan Chittum

    Rupert Murdoch's board of directors was in the spotlight a bit yesterday, with stories in The Daily Beast and The Wall Street Journal looking at how bogus its claims of independence are. The Journal gets some sharp critics on the record but undermines that by granting anonymity to board members to talk about how "very comfortable" they are with their...

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15. October 30, 2012 06:50 AM

    The ‘downright dangerous’ Paul Krugman

    CNBC's Becky Quick thinks, wrongly, the economist is alone in debunking "fiscal crisis"

    By Ryan Chittum

    This summer, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went on CNBC to talk about his book and ended up getting ambushed by a pack of smug, out of touch, and/or misinformed journalists, something I wrote was emblematic of the network's financial capture. Now CNBC's Becky Quick, one of the more level heads over there, takes to the pages of Fortune...

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16. January 18, 2011 06:53 PM

    The Dead Source Who Keeps on Giving

    Fortune joins the WSJ in putting Jerome York on the record after his death

    By Ryan Chittum

    Back in March, I noticed The Wall Street Journal appearing to burn an off-the-record source a few days after he died. Now it's Fortune's turn to put the same source on the record posthumously. And it, unlike the WSJ, at least tells readers that its conversation with Jerome York was off the record: However, during that absence, Fortune can report,...

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17. April 4, 2011 03:41 PM

    The Power of Iterative Journalism

    NYT, Fortune, and ProPublica on General Electric's taxes

    By Felix Salmon

    On March 25, the NYT's David Kocieniewski splashed a bombshell of a story across the front page; its current headline, online, is "GE’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether": The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed...

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18. April 27, 2011 08:44 AM

    Whither Twitter?

    By Dean Starkman

    What does it mean if Mark Zuckerberg doesn't obsess about you anymore? Fortune's story from last week on Twitter's prospects contained some food for thought on the precarious existence of a social-media juggernaut. Once mighty, now...leveling off? Just two years ago Twitter was the hottest thing on the web. But in the past year U.S. traffic at Twitter.com, the...

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