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April 6, 2011 12:05 PM
“Don’t Call it a Paywall”
A panel discussion with NYT’s Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Janet Robinson
On Tuesday night, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and New York Times Company president and CEO Janet Robinson spoke at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in a panel discussion titled “The Future of Media, Publishing, and Paid Content.” The title was perhaps a bit too grand, as the discussion, not surprisingly, mainly focused on the Times’s new...
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March 17, 2011 05:40 PM
“Information Wants to Be Free”; The NYT Does Not
Paywall reactions and misunderstandings
The New York Times has announced that its metered paywall will go into effect on March 28, costing readers $15 per month to read more than twenty articles in a month’s time, with the price going up a bit for the use of the Times mobile application. On day one, at least, opinion on the web seems widely negative—although, perhaps...
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April 26, 2011 11:20 AM
LAT Surveys “Parallel, Opaque System of Political Giving”
If companies don’t disclose, nobody knows
A tip of the hat to the Los Angeles Times for spending six months surveying the political spending disclosure practices of the seventy-five largest publicly traded energy, healthcare, and financial service companies and then rating them, spreadsheet-style, on transparency (methodology explained here). It should not startle you to learn that "only a few" of these companies fully disclose their political...
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April 5, 2012 07:55 PM
NYT Examines Chris Christie’s Corporate Welfare Machine
Charlie Bagli takes a nice look in The New York Times at the corporate-welfare machine that is Chris Christie's administration in New Jersey, and reports that the governor has approved a record $1.6 billion in handouts to companies to date. Prudential Financial made $3.7 billion in net income last year. Christie gave it $251 million to move into a new...
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April 11, 2011 01:58 PM
NYT Eyes a Conflict of Interest at JPMorgan
The bank made a couple billion dollars as its clients lost their shirts
The New York Times looks at a lawsuit over conflicts of interest at JPMorgan and how the bank covered its own flank—and made a couple billion dollars—while letting its clients lose hundreds of millions of dollars. It's interesting stuff. Louise Story expands on an October story she wrote on how JPMorgan made bets with other people's money that it could...
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December 10, 2010 12:15 PM
NYT Finds a Mortgage-Mod Program That Works
David Bornstein has a great post about ESOP, an Ohio non-profit which acts as a middleman between homeowners and lenders, and which does a much better job of getting modifications done than banks and borrowers are if left to their own devices. He writes: One thing that distinguished ESOP from the government’s program, as well as other mortgage counselors, is...
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March 28, 2011 02:40 PM
NYT Follows Walmart’s Weird OSHA Fight
The New York Times reported this weekend that a judge upheld $7,000 fine OSHA levied against Walmart for the trampling death of a worker a couple of years ago. Ho-hum. But what's interesting is how hard Walmart has fought it: Wal-Mart had mounted an aggressive defense to overturn the $7,000 fine, causing OSHA officials to complain that the company had...
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April 13, 2012 08:42 AM
NYT Gives a (Very Reluctant) Kudos to Al Jazeera
And the award for coverage of the Haitian cholera epidemic goes to . . . No, not The New York Times, nor The Washington Post, nor even the Miami Herald. No it goes to Al Jazeera, the news organization that found the cause of the epidemic and told the world about it.* Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s version of our...
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November 9, 2011 01:41 PM
NYT on How Unions Are Learning From Occupy Wall Street
The New York Times reports on how the American labor movement, whose membership and power have crumbled over the last few decades, is getting something of a second wind from the Occupy Wall Street protests. The picture I get from this report by Steven Greenhouse, one of the few labor beat reporters left in the mainstream press (props, NYT), is...
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November 29, 2010 11:16 AM
NYT on the Irish Mess
A private-sector crisis turned into the people's problem by politicians.
This New York Times lede from Friday is terrific, conveying as it does the Bizarro world of the Irish bailout: Cut Ireland’s minimum wage? Check. Collect more in property taxes from beleaguered homeowners? Check. Raise the corporate tax rate, which could plug the gaping hole in Ireland’s tattered balance sheets even faster? Well, no. It leads into a nice overview...
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October 20, 2011 02:53 PM
NYT Paywall to Other Papers: “Copy Me!”
There's no excuse for other publishers not to follow the Times's model
If The New York Times spun off its digital edition, it would be the tenth biggest paper in the country by circulation, with more paying readers than the Chicago Sun-Times and just behind the Chicago Tribune in circ. With its third quarter results out this morning, the Times further solidifies the case for its paywall strategy, which has brought it...
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February 10, 2011 02:50 PM
NYT Reports Bear Stearns Wasn’t Alone on Putbacks
Plus, Wall Street saw fraud signs, demanded money back, then kept buying loans
The New York Times has a very good look today at what the Ambac lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase could mean in continuing to unravel the sordid CDO story. Remember that suit was unsealed two weeks ago and revealed that Bear Stearns had demanded repayment for shoddy mortgages it had bought to bundle, slice up, and sell—while denying repayment to the...
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February 3, 2012 02:41 PM
NYT With More on the SEC’s Soft Touch With Big Banks
The New York Times has an excellent investigation today that shows in a new light how the SEC lets Wall Street off the hook despite repeated fraud. Edward Wyatt reports that the SEC has given banks waivers 350 times in the last ten years that allow it to avoid "the full force of the law" supposed to govern what happens...
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February 24, 2011 02:44 PM
NYT’s Scoop on an Alleged Roger Ailes Coverup
Lawyers say the Fox chief urged Judith Regan to lie to the feds about Giuliani pal Bernie Kerik
The New York Times has an excellent scoop out today that could mean trouble for Fox News's Roger Ailes. It's sure worth following. The paper reports that former News Corporation book publisher Judith Regan (and now her former lawyers) said that Ailes asked her to lie to the feds about her relationship with Bernie Kerik in order to help Rudy...
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December 6, 2010 07:22 PM
NYT, Jamie Dimon, and Too Big to Fail
Felix Salmon already dissected Roger Lowenstein's, as he called it, "credulous" New York Times Mag profile of press favorite Jamie Dimon. But a couple of other things stuck out in Lowenstein's piece: Dimon echoes the standard business sentiment that boundaries that create inefficiencies raise costs for the enterprise and, therefore, for customers. Perfectly unfettered, he thinks one bank could gain...
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June 1, 2011 01:16 PM
NYT: Fabulous Fab Pointed Fingers at Goldman
Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson raise a good question in their agenda-setting piece in The New York Times this morning: Why was Fabrice Tourre the only Goldman Sachs employee charged with defrauding investors in the Abacus deal, and why was Abacus the only deal it prosecuted filed suit over? (Adding: A reader emails to say "prosecuted" implies criminal charges, so...
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December 8, 2010 03:22 PM
The New York Times Demonizes the Bond Market
Did you know there's a fight to the death going on in Europe? The NYT covers it today, under the headline "Central Bank and Financiers Fight Over Fate of the Euro." Let's see if we can spot a theme here: On one side is the European Central Bank, which is spending billions to prop up Europe’s weak-kneed bond markets... On...
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March 23, 2012 04:51 PM
The New York Times Goes to the Dogs
Canine-centric stories skyrocket during early months of Abramson’s reign
There’s really no other way to say this: The New York Times is going to the dogs. Dogs have been appearing in the paper 45 percent more frequently since Jill Abramson took over as executive editor last November. How do I know this? I recently did some research in the LexisNexis database, where I found that the number of Times...
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May 24, 2011 12:17 PM
Times’s Bruni Becomes Paper’s First Openly Gay Columnist
In March we asked our readers whom they thought The New York Times should hire to replace op-ed writers Bob Herbert and Frank Rich. Names that came up included Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and outgoing NPR ombudswoman Alicia Shepard; there were also several noms for the “PunditMom.” It turns out Times opinion page editor Andrew Rosenthal wasn’t reading cjr.org that day....
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May 2, 2011 12:11 PM
WSJ Notes That Commodities Go Down, Too
The business press is much more sensitive to signs of price increases than it is to signs of price decreases. So it's good to see The Wall Street Journal take note of the fact that some critical commodities have been plunging in recent weeks. The months-long rally in commodity prices has sparked fears it could ignite inflation or cripple consumer...
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