I thank New York Magazine and its Daily Intel blog for making me momentarily famous in the areas between Popover’s and the B’nei Jeshurun shul.
However, I wonder if it’s not too much to ask the Intel people to read the actual words I write.
The piece NY Mag is trying to criticize observes simply that the main beat the business press purports to cover—business, led by Wall Street—just blew up, a fairly obvious fact that only sounds controversial. The major institutions on the beat have disappeared or been nationalized. They were there. Now they’re gone. This event, it seems to me, raises important questions for journalism.
The point, pretty simple, was to call for a discussion on whether the business press needs to rethink its approach to its job, either in general or in any of its particulars. The answer of several commenters to my piece appears to be, no, everything is fine.
Lots of luck to them.
But, I didn’t write, ask, or even remotely suggest anything to support this NY Magazine headline…
Will the Wall Street Crisis Wipe Out Business Journalism?
…or anything like what is said in the opening sentence of this post (my emphasis):
The Columbia Journalism Review has a weird little rant today in which they predict the current Wall Street crisis will wipe out financial journalism. “The beat covered by many publications and thousands of reporters and editors has collapsed,” Dean Starkman reports.
So, nothing about financial journalism being wiped out. This bizarre error is followed by a quote from my piece that has nothing to do with the sentence NY Mag just wrote:
Business media outlets that claim to provide authoritative coverage of Wall Street during good times should be first in line for scrutiny now. These would include any publication with the words “wall” and “street” in its name, as well as anything named “deal,” “New York,” “business,” “investors,” and for that matter, “times” and “day.” Bloomberg also apparently boasts supremacy in coverage of the markets that just melted. Oh well. And Forbes and Fortune, you’re in this, too.
Daily Intel then goes on to disagree with the argument I never made…
Wait, what? We’re sorry, we know that journalists love nothing more than declaring journalism dead, but this is just absurd.
…and then gets Andrew Ross Sorkin of the Times to disagree, too!
“I’d say it is just the opposite,” Sorkin confirmed when we asked him what he thought of Starkman’s assertion. “Financial journalism is more important than ever. It’s like we’re firefighters and the biggest house on the street is now ablaze.”
I’m all for “real-time” commentary, and all that, but this is drivel.
Dean, I think you need to disclose the fact that you dramatically changed the piece since we wrote about it, and that in fact what we were reacting to was an entirely different piece of writing from what is up there now.
Posted by Jessica Pressler on Thu 2 Oct 2008 at 10:33 AM
This is an odd accusation and it is not true. I edited this piece, and once it was posted, no substantial changes were made. We don't know what you are talking about, and we remain convinced that New York simply (and utterly) misread our original article, and that that you should probably slow down when you read things you are going to critique.
Posted by mike hoyt on Thu 2 Oct 2008 at 11:13 AM
Well, look. I read the original piece like four days ago, and I can't claim at this point have a photographic recollection of what was up there. And it's not like I printed it out, not having anticipated that the Columbia Journalism Review would alter something, substantially or otherwise, without making a note of it, and then call for a "correction" of an interpretation. Still, this looks different to me, particularly points 3-5. But you know what? It's cool, because it's still vague and convoluted enough that I would say my "critique" still holds up pretty well! So, bests! JP
Posted by Pressler on Thu 2 Oct 2008 at 07:19 PM
The attached pdf is a Google cache of Dean's original story from 9/29 at 19:26:56—about 24 hours before your post critiquing it went up on New York’s Daily Intel blog. This original shows that we didn’t change anything, not a single comma.
First, you attack a line of reasoning we never made and get the facts wrong in doing so. OK, stuff happens. But then, when we protest your straw-man critique, you make the strange accusation that we changed our original story in order to cover ourselves. But we didn't. You got the facts wrong again. What’s going on over there?
Posted by mike hoyt on Fri 3 Oct 2008 at 12:12 PM
Hi Dean and Mark. Well. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't accused you of changing the story after publication without actually checking that out. Nevertheless, as I said, I stand by my criticism of Dean's piece, which I found confounding and overly apocalyptic. JP
Posted by Pressler on Mon 6 Oct 2008 at 09:57 AM