This is far too facile. Carol Loomis has been covering Warren Buffett for half a century, and by Buffett’s own admission they talk pretty much every day. He’s friends with her family, and she with his: there is essentially no distance at all between Loomis and Buffett. But Loomis is a first-rate journalist all the same. Or, if Sullivan wants to stay within the NYT, she need look no further than Gretchen Morgenson, who became so close to her source Josh Rosner that they ended up writing a book together.
I think that Sullivan thinks that the DealBook conference, far from being a smart way of monetizing the NYT brand, was meant to be some kind of public grilling: a live Meet The Press for the Wall Street set. Such an event would certainly be interesting, although it’s hard to see why any potential interviewee would say yes to such a format: while politicians have to be out in front of the public, CEOs do not. And in any case, it’s far from certain that anybody would actually get more value out of watching hard questions than they currently do out of watching relative softballs. Last year, for instance, I moderated a panel where I asked a pretty tough question of NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer; he got a bit flustered and angry, but didn’t really say much of substance, and I can’t say that the audience was particularly well served by that question.
Sullivan’s next beef is even less comprehensible:
More than anything, DealBook is one of those creatures of 21st-century journalism - as much about “brand” as anything else.
Sullivan never explains how this distinguishes 21st-century journalism from 20th-century journalism or even 19th-century journalism; it seems to me that journalism has always been about building brands, and probably always will be. But Sullivan, with her creatures and her scare quotes, clearly thinks there’s something newfangled and distasteful going on here: I would love to see a future post where she explains exactly what that might be. In this post, she just counts logos, which tells us exactly nothing about anything. But she did worry about the fact that the conference was sponsored:
Such sponsorships are another creature of 21st-century newspapering, eroding the sharp line between advertising and editorial content.
Huh? This I just don’t get at all. The editorial content surrounding the conference was clear: there was a DealBook newspaper supplement, and a live blog, and I daresay there might even be a separate article or two somewhere on the NYT website. But all of that content had exactly the same line between editorial and advertising that any other NYT editorial content has. Yes, some of the ads were for BlackBerry, which sponsored the conference and I’m sure got a big package deal. But I don’t see BlackBerry infesting the editorial content anywhere; the BlackBerry product demonstration, for instance, didn’t even get a mention in the live blog.
I suspect that what Sullivan is implying here is that the conference itself is editorial content, and that since Blackberry was on stage during the conference, that makes it seem editorially-endorsed, somehow. That’s a stretch: it’s exactly the same adjacency tactic which drives the age-old model of having advertisements in the newspaper. When the BlackBerry presentation is introduced by the Chief Advertising Officer of nytimes.com, it’s pretty clear which side of the editorial/advertising divide it lies.
Sullivan wraps up her complaints — the things she says “can’t help but make me a little queasy” — thusly:
Given the lunchtime rollout of a new Blackberry device, the overall friendly questioning of prominent newsmakers, the reception afterward - featuring wine, hors d’oeuvres and the incessant rubbing of journalistic and corporate elbows — the word “adversarial” did not come to mind. Nor did the word “watchdog.”
yes, yes, Sorkin's Too Big to Fail is an Important Historical Document . . . in the sense that it's the pinnacle of the post-crash you-are-there-like-a-fly-on-the-wall Tick-Tock form popularized by well-sourced journalists who miss/ignore all (or most) of the warning signs of a coming disaster but are able to cash in after the crash and write credulously about the THRILLING FINAL DAYS as the Titans of Finance work frenetically to Save the World (and also send out for pizza topped with [fill in succulent detail only available to the most well-accessed reporter/entrepreneurs here] ).
Prior to the Great Meltdown of 2008, how much insight did Sorkin's vaunted access provide us into systemic fraud in the nation's mortgage-industrial complex? Accounting fraud and other flavors of fraud and misconduct on Wall Street? Folly and regulatory laxity at the Fed? Or, for that matter, the Too Big to Fail problem that the title suggests is the subject of his book?
Business reporting doesn't have to be self-consciously adversarial or watchdog-oriented to provide something of value that goes beyond the access-oriented brand of journalism. It just needs to invigorated by an understanding that high-level access isn't an end-all-be-all but a starting point.
Yes, talk to the CEOs and their lieutenants but also work hard to track down the mid- and low-level folks who can provide fresh insights that the top-rung folks may not have or may choose to ignore/silence -- risk managers, compliance officers, fraud investigators, salesmen, brokers, clerks, secretaries, etc. Combine this non-cocktail-party/non-expense-account-lunch/non-Davos brand of source development with clear-eyed analysis of financial statements, academic papers, court records and the like, and you've got something -- blinders-off journalism about real issues rather than a well-wrought pastiche of inside baseball and tantalizing tidbits.
#1 Posted by mwh, CJR on Sun 16 Dec 2012 at 11:37 PM