The Audit

Debits & Credits: 10,000 Words in Search of a Trend

Plus: Undue credit-taking at the WSJ; Wilson Quarterly’s wise look at schools; Variety’s empty Olympics coverage, etc.

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A Debit to The Economist for a special report on how digital technology is making us “nomads.”

You may recall the relatively recent frenzy over telecommuting, and how we were all going to never get stuck in traffic or get stuck in a gray, fuzzy-walled cubicle. That didn’t really pan out, at least not to the extent its prophets had predicted. Now, the Economist looks at another (dated, we might add) trend: digital nomads, working from their laptops and BlackBerrys in coffee shops and on park benches.

The magazine (or newspaper, as it likes to call itself) goes on and on, and on some more, about digital nomads for more than 10,000 words. Look, we work in coffee shops on occasion, and the issue of technology and social change is vital. But The Economist doesn’t do it justice by printing a painfully long think piece with very little actual reporting.

If you want an overview of current academic arguments, you’ll enjoy this. If you want to hear about how people are using technology in interesting ways—surfing the Internet at Starbucks doesn’t qualify—don’t bother.

At more than a dozen pages it’s more manifesto than magazine piece. And like many manifestos, this one leans utopian, but our main problem with the report is that there’s too much talking to academics and not enough other reporting. It also presents news from 2006 as if it’s cutting edge. For scholars that is pretty close to cutting edge. For a weekly, it’s just late.

Congratulations not in order

A Debit to the WSJ for ill-advised credit-taking in a special report on executive compensation.

Editor Lawrence Rout gives credit for a supposed stricter-boards trend to the Journal’s Joann S. Lublin for her reporting on the issue last year. The note hedges, of course, and says “perhaps” she deserves “some” credit, but it strongly implies the paper has been out front on this issue, when that is not the case.

We understand an editor’s impulse to pat a good reporter on the back. But the fact remains The New York Times has done much better, more sustained work for longer on this subject than the Journal. Gretchen Morgenson has for years produced strong work about unhinged executive pay, as have others at the paper, as well.

The WSJ’s Editor’s Note begins:

I’m not giving Joann Lublin all the credit, but…

Last year’s Journal Report on executive pay featured a cover story by Joann, ‘Ten Ways to Restore Investor Confidence in Compensation.’

The note touts the influence of one of the executive-comp stories in the previous year’s special report, drawing parallels between what Lublin suggested and what some boards have started do.

Rule No. 1 last year: Make sure the board’s pay consultants don’t also work for management. No. 1 on Joann’s list this year of things that boards’ compensation panels are starting to do: retaining their own lawyers.

That’s fine, but Eric Dash of the Times wrote a similar story more than three months earlier, as part of a New York Times series called Gilded Paychecks, offering “eight steps that compensation experts say might rein in executive pay.” His first tip was: “Hire independent advisers.”

The Times didn’t drop the issue with that series. It put out another special report on executive pay earlier this month, minus the self-congratulation. And it disagrees with the Journal on the impact of any changes that have taken place. Here’s Times reporter Claudia H. Deutsch:

Wasn’t 2008 supposed to be the year of shareholder victory on the executive compensation front?

After all, tighter disclosure rules kicked in last year, and—the theory went—once companies had to shine a spotlight on their compensation practices, they were bound to make them better. Politicians, never loath to acknowledge the national mood—particularly in an election year—held several hearings about excessive pay.

But signs of sweeping change remain few.

The Times has earned greater credibility on this subject.

Even so, as the Times’s Dash reminds us (with our emphasis):

Despite the growing attention over the last 25 years, the average chief executive’s compensation at big companies increased more than 600 percent, to $8 million dollars a year after adjusting for inflation. Meanwhile, the ratio between the average pay for a top executive and a worker, which held steady in the 30 years before 1980, has more than quadrupled, to a multiple of 170, according to recent academic research.

If unaccountable boards were a problem, then journalism has not been the solution; executive pay is simply not an area for victory laps.

A deeper look at the schools crisis

A Credit to The Wilson Quarterly for Jay Mathews’s excellent article debunking the myth that U.S. students are undereducated, unmotivated, and dragging down the American economy.

It turns out, as is too often the case, those observers who lament the decline of American schools have overlooked class divides. The article’s subhead sums up the problem:

Bad schools are not going to sink the American economy. Despite what the headlines say, U.S. students fare well in international comparisons. It’s the schools serving the poor that demand our attention.

Variety: Not great, from the gate; also late

Variety gets a Debit for a virtually valueless front-page story on the Olympic challenges facing NBC.

For NBC, the headlong plunge into the Olympics in Beijing poses a higher-than-usual degree of difficulty.

Protests directed at China’s human-rights record—yielding chaotic images as the Olympic torch toured Europe, before its lone U.S. stop in San Francisco—threaten to turn the marathon leading toward the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies into a gauntlet. And they may portend more tension during the Games themselves, with China admitting April 10 that it had cracked down on a ring intending to kidnap athletes, journalists and tourists.

If this had come a week earlier, it would have been news. In the April 14-20 edition, it’s just stating the obvious.

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