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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged private equity

1. June 27, 2012 02:37 AM

   Audit Notes: Gannett profits, Spiegel grilling, private equity

   By Ryan Chittum

   At least Gannett is optimistic about the next few years, The Wall Street Journal reports (emphasis mine): Gannett, publisher of USA Today and the largest U.S. newspaper network by circulation, reaffirmed last week it expects revenue to rise 2% to 4% annually and earnings growth to expand by 2015. Though its print advertising revenue fell 8.4% in the first quarter,...

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2. October 29, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: inequality denial, AIG’s CEO, private equity

   WSJ op-ed pushes the false notion that the rich haven't pulled away from everyone else

   By Ryan Chittum

   The New Republic's Timothy Noah and The Atlantic's Matthew O'Brien demolish a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Kevin "Dow 36,000" Hassett and Aparna Mathur that purports to debunk the fact that inequality has increased dramatically over the last few decades. Noah: Hassett and Mathur answer that such studies “leave out too much.” They don’t include employer-provided benefits, or they don’t...

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3. May 24, 2012 12:21 AM

   Audit notes: No more daily in New Orleans, McClatchy, private equity

   The NYT reports the Times-Picayune will print two or three times a week

   By Ryan Chittum

   If ever a town needed a newspaper, it's New Orleans. But David Carr reports that Newhouse is preparing big layoffs at the Times-Picayune, which will no longer be a daily newspaper. Newhouse Newspapers, which owns the Times-Picayune, will apparently be working off a blueprint the company used in Ann Arbor, Mich., where it reduced the frequency of the Ann Arbor...

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4. September 13, 2012 11:30 AM

   Audit Notes: NYT and Bain, Dimon’s Comp Committee, 401(k)s

   Too much focus on Romney, who left the company years before the alleged collusion

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's great that The New York Times is going aggressively after court documents in a big private-equity bid-rigging lawsuit, filing a motion to get documents unsealed. But I wonder how relevant it is to mention its former CEO Mitt Romney so prominently in a story about alleged anticompetitive behavior that occurred at least two years after he left the firm....

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5. January 12, 2012 08:01 PM

   Audit Notes: Romney’s Black Box, Banker Probe, Laffer Curveball

   By Ryan Chittum

   Politico makes a good point about how reporters are having something of a hard time assessing Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital: So far, the definitive and comprehensive answers to these questions have proven elusive to even the country’s best journalists because of the very private nature of private equity. The greatest privacy-destroying force known to man — an American...

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6. August 7, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: Singing on Libor, another bank scandal, Star Tribune

   The NYT on how banks are turning each other in

   By Ryan Chittum

   The New York Times, in a good page-one story, reports that giant banks are selling each other out trying to scurry to safety in the Libor scandal. In trying to work out a deal, (Barclays) offered information on the multiyear scheme with Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole, according to government and bank officials. Also, a senior trader...

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7. November 13, 2012 08:06 PM

   Audit Notes: WaPo on the Bain thing, deadbeat Forbes, hamster wheel

   The Post's revealing slip-up on the definition of swift-boating

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Washington Post apparently doesn't understand just how toxic Wall Street and its even more rapacious cousin, private equity—not popular in good times—really is now. The paper actually thought it might have been an error for Obama to attack Romney over his Bain Capital days: It also looked, at first, like a mistake. Democrats such as former president Bill Clinton,...

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8. January 9, 2012 02:34 PM

   It’s the WSJ’s Turn on Romney’s Private Equity Record

   By Ryan Chittum

   Mitt Romney's tenure at private-equity firm Bain Capital is the gift that will keep on giving for journalists. Reuters reported last week that a Romney purchase required a federal bailout, even though Bain made big money on it. The Los Angeles Times found last month that four of Bain's top ten acquisitions went bankrupt. Now a Wall Street Journal investigation...

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9. January 19, 2012 12:08 PM

   On Debt, Mitt’s of Two Minds

   A career built on it and a campaign that rails against it

   By Ryan Chittum

   Jesse Eisinger has a smart New York Times column on how Mitt Romney, fittingly perhaps, is running on debt while running against it. The GOP frontrunner is a former private-equity CEO, of course, which means his business success, the basis of much of his campaign, is owed, so to speak, almost entirely to borrowing scads of money. At the same...

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10. January 23, 2012 05:30 PM

    Patent Trolls 4 News Paywalls

    Nathan Myhrvold makes some common errors about the newspaper industry

    By Ryan Chittum

    As far as voices of support go, the news business probably wishes it could do better than a patent troll . But I suppose it'll take what it can get these days. Unfortunately, Nathan Myhrvold, writing for Bloomberg View, gets a couple of pretty big things wrong in describing the woes of the newspaper business. For instance, in discussing them,...

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11. January 6, 2012 03:15 PM

    Reuters on Romney’s Private-Equity Past

    How Bain Capital profited as workers got crushed

    By Ryan Chittum

    Reuters has a great look today at how Mitt Romney's Bain Capital loaded up a steel company with debt, mismanaged it, drove it into bankruptcy, dumped tens of millions of dollars of pension obligations on the federal government after underfunding them for years, cost workers up to a quarter of their pensions—and walked away with a big profit. The Republicans...

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12. November 1, 2011 07:20 PM

    Subprime Déjà Vu

    The Los Angeles Times investigates the Buy Here Pay Here car market

    By Ryan Chittum

    In this market, the companies handing out loans make money whether you pay them back or not. Agents trick hard-luck, often ill-educated customers into predatory loan terms that are much worse than they agreed to with sky-high interest rates. One quarter of the loans default and lenders seize the property, which is worth far less than the purchase price. Wall...

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13. October 12, 2012 06:50 AM

    The NYT unseals a private-equity scoop

    Emails between executives look like antitrust smoking guns

    By Ryan Chittum

    A tip of The Audit's green eyeshade to The New York Times for fighting to get this look inside the private-equity "club deals" of the bubble era. The paper brought a motion two months ago to unseal a lawsuit that alleges private-equity firms used those club deals to collude to drive down deal prices. The PE lawyers had gotten the...

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14. May 25, 2012 02:26 PM

    The private-equity problem with Romney and GS Technologies (UPDATED)

    Loading up a company with debt to ensure Bain's own profits

    By Ryan Chittum

    It's seriously grating to see an Eton and Oxford-educated ambassador's son who works for the Council on Foreign Relations rant about Obama's "populist" attack on private equity. That's Sebastian Mallaby, who takes to the Financial Times to defend Mitt Romney and Bain Capital's honor, as well as the honor of the private-equity industry at large. Here's the top: Having hit...

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